Gifts With Meaning – Designing Your Own Gift Cards With Word 2007

Of all the gifts that my husband has given me, a pack of gift certificates was the most memorable and the most meaningful. And it cost almost nothing. The old cliché ‘it’s the thought that counts’ really rings true. A thoughtful gift, handmade with love, is to me so much more meaningful that something bought at the shop.

The thing about gift certificates like these is that it’s a gift that keeps on giving. After the special day has long passed, you can pull one of the gift certificates out and get a present all over again.

With Christmas coming up, making your own gift certificates can be a great present for the hard to buy for person and is a very inexpensive option. Make them handmade, or use a computer and printer, or combine the two methods to make up some snazzy gift certificates.

Below is a tutorial for making up some gift certificates using Word 2007. As usual, this can be done in earlier versions using the drop down menus instead. I originally created this tutorial to use in conjunction with mail merge for the class I teach. Save the file as a template, and you can reuse the file over and over. Print your certificates on nice paper, cut them out, paste them on some nice cardboard and embellish however you like. Scrapbooking supplies can be a fun and creative way to jazz them up.

1. Think up some ideas on what the recipient would like. Washing up, massage, vacuuming… You may have a special skill like electrician or gardener, that you can offer as a gift certificate. Or just something more romantic like above.

2. Next we are going to create a custom label to make our certificates uniform. Open up a blank word document and go to the Mailing tab. Click on Labels, the labels window will appear. Click on the options button to open up the options window and click on the New Label button.

3. Call your new label “Gift Certificate” and customise it as follows:

a. Margin top and side: 1.5cm

b. Height: 8cm

c. Width: 16cm

d. Number of labels across: 1; number of labels down: 3

e. Vertical Pitch: 9cm

f. Paper size: A4

Of course, you can play around with the dimensions to customise to your own preferences.

4. Click ok, then ok again in the options window, then the new document button in the labels window to create your labels. You should be able to see the grid on the page and have something that looks like this:

You will notice that the tables ribbon options have come up, we have actually created a table.

Now we want to create a border around our certificate. If you want to put a border around using coloured pens or paper or scrapbooking stuff, then leave steps 5 to 7 out or put in a thin border in a light colour to help as a guide once the certificates are printed.

5. Click on the table select tool at the top left corner of the table to select it.

6. Under the Design tab, click on the borders button and select borders and shading. Customise your border colour and width and select the all button.

7. The border also goes around the gaps between each label. The gaps are where we are going to cut, so we don’t want the left and right borders. To get rid of these borders, highlight the gap by clicking just to the left of it, click on borders to bring up the borders and shading window, and deselect the side borders as shown below. You will need to do this for both gaps between the three labels.

In order to line up all our information neatly, we are going to create another table within our label and then hide it later on. We will do all the formatting in the first label and copy it into the other labels at the end.

8. Click inside the first label and go to the Insert tab and insert a table that has 2 columns and three rows. The table tools ribbon will be available again.

9. In the top, we’ll create a heading. In the top left cell type in “Gift Certificate”. Highlight that cell and the one next to it, click on the Layout tab under Table Tools and click on Merge cells.

10. Next we’ll insert a picture. Click in the left cell under the gift certificate heading, and then go to the Insert tab and click clip art. Word comes with very little clip art these days but you can browse thousands of pictures online and download these to use. Just follow the instructions on the Microsoft clipart site. Use the clipart wizard to search for and insert a picture.

Alternatively, you may wish to put in a photograph from your camera using the Picture option in the Insert ribbon, or put a temporary place holder in to glue a picture or embellishment in later. The place holder helps arrange the sizing on the label.

Ensure that the picture text wrapping is “inline with text”. You can find the text wrapping option in the Picture ribbon that will automatically appear when you click on your picture.

Resize your picture and Centre it using the text centring option under the Home tab.

11. In the other cells, insert the gift certificate information as relevant.

12. Using the Home ribbon, format the text as desired. It will look something similar to this:

13. Select the inside table using the table select tool in the top left corner, and go to borders and shading and deselect the border. This gets rid of the inside table border. You will still be able to see the guide lines, but these don’t print.

14. Under the Mailing tab, select Update Labels. This will copy the formatting down to the other labels. Update each label, changing the details and picture as desired. If you want to paste your own picture in, now is the time to delete the place holder.

At the beginning of each new label the words “next record” appear. Just highlight and delete this.

15. Check out the print preview to view your work, make any necessary adjustments, and you’re done!

Print, cut, glue and embellish. You now have your own set of snazzy gift certificates. Be sure to save the file so that next time you want to produce some gift certificates, you can skip most of these steps and it’s easy as pie.

Have you read these posts?

1. Handmade Gifts Part 5 – Hampers and Gift Wrapping
2. Handmade Gift Ideas Part 4 – Food Gifts
3. Handmade Treat Bags and Gift Boxes
4. choosing (or making) the perfect gift
5. frugal valentine gift ideas