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![](data:image/svg+xml, %3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' height='64' class='font-weight-bold' style='font: 600 30.11764705882353px "SegoeUI", Arial' width='64'%3E%3Ccircle fill='hsl(128, 8%, 22%)' cx='32' cy='32' r='32' /%3E%3Ctext x='50%25' y='55%25' dominant-baseline='middle' text-anchor='middle' fill='%23FFF' %3EA%3C/text%3E%3C/svg%3E)
Hello,
I've created a range of letterheads for my client, and made them into word documents they can use. They all have the letterhead design in a pdf inserted into the word doc header in the background... I'm sure you can picture that - pretty standard.
The artwork for the letterhead that was inserted is in a PDF format.
The word documents are saved as templates.
They all look great at my end. However at their end the background letterheads are blurry, like not rendered properly.
They are using MS365 as am I. I am on Mac.
I'm somewhat guessing that if I change the PDF's for jpgs or something like that, it might work (not tested this yet), however the perfectionist in me wants them to be the best quality, so pdf is obviously preferred as they are vector based.
Hope someone can help shed some light on this issue.
Best,
Jon
A family of Microsoft word processing software products for creating web, email, and print documents.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
PDF is only a valid picture format on a Mac. But even then, the PDF is not saved in the file. Instead it is converted to a low-res PNG or an EMF vector.
To keep the art in vector format, use the open-source program InkScape to convert to EMF or SVG. Then insert that in an Office program. It will not get converted to a bitmap.
One additional consideration.
You say that "they are using MS365." If they are using the online version of Word, that is a different program and may well be giving different results than would the desktop application.
Hi Jon,
I suspect that it is the pdf rather than .png or .jpg that is the problem on their end. It may simply be the graphics hardware on their computers. I do not know that a pdf inserted retains its vector properties.
I suspect you have seen these, but if not, here are some resources on creating letterhead templates in Word:
A Word letterhead should have more than an image. It should be using styles and fields, especially the StyleRef field, to make as much use of Word's features as possible, while lessening the burden on the user.
You may want to put your letterhead in a separate global template as AutoText or another building block and incorporate it in your document templates using an AutoText field. That makes for easy global updates later on.
One additional consideration:
You say that "they are using MS365." If they are using the online version of Word, that is a different program and may well be giving different results than would the desktop application.
that's excellent info, thank you John!!
thank you for your time and the link, I shall have a look at that. Good point on whether it's the online version or not. HOWEVER, this is a big company with locations in various parts of the world, so really, we need the template to work in all versions of word. So even if it is that... it still needs to be fixed.
Yeah the reason I chose to use pdf is that when they then save their their word documents as pdfs, the document will / should be able to be zoomed in as far it can go and the logos and things remain super sharp. That was the intension anyway.
I'll try them with a png background tomorrow I think, if I can't get any further on this.