A great cover page draws in readers. If you use Microsoft Word, you’re in luck, because Word has ready to use cover pages. But did you know that Word also lets you create custom cover pages? Here’s how to use both.
How to Add a Ready-to-Use Cover Page to Your Word Document
Word includes some cover page templates you can insert and then customize a bit if you need a quick cover page for your document.
To find them, switch over to the “Insert” tab on Word’s Ribbon and then click the “Cover Page” button. (If your window isn’t maximized, you might see a “Pages” button instead. Click that to show the “Cover Page” button.)
On the drop-down menu, click the cover page you want to use.
You can now add your document title, subtitle, date, and other information, as well as change the design up a bit if you want.
How to Create a Custom Cover Page in Microsoft Word
Creating a cover page from a template is easy enough, but if you don’t like any of the built-in designs, you can create your own. You can do this on an existing document, but it’s easiest to start with a blank document. We’re going to be saving the custom cover page so that you can quickly insert it into an existing document anyway.
You can create your cover page using pretty much any of Word’s tools. You can add a background color, picture, or texture. You can also position those elements how you want and even apply Word’s text wrapping tools to them. Make it look however you want.
When it comes to content, you have a couple of options. You can just type the text you want, but that wouldn’t make it much of a template unless you want the same text on the cover page every time you use it.
Instead, you can use Word’s Quick Parts feature to add document properties to the document. To do that, switch over to the “Insert” tab and then click the “Quick Parts” button.
On the drop-down menu, point to the “Document Property” submenu, and you’ll see a bunch of different properties you can insert into your document: author, title, company, publish date, and so on. Go ahead and insert whichever properties you want to appear on your title page.
When you’re done, you’ll have several fields on your page. When you insert your cover page into a document later on, those fields are populated with the actual properties from the document (and you can also edit them on the fly if you want).
They’re super plain to start with, but you can treat them like any other text in Word by applying styles and formatting, centering them on the page—whatever. Here, we’ve centered them on the page, applied the Title style to the title, shifted things down on the page a bit, and inserted a filigree illustration for a little flair. It’s not the prettiest cover page around, but it’s a good working example.
Now that we’ve got our cover page the way we want it, it’s time to create a cover page template out of it.
First, select everything in the document (that’s why we recommend starting this in a blank document) by pressing Ctrl+A. Next, head back to the “Insert” tab and then click that “Cover Page” button again.
This time, choose the “Save Selection to Cover Page Gallery” command from the drop-down menu.
In the window that opens, give your cover page a name and fill out a brief description if you want. Click “OK” when you’re done.
Now when you open the “Cover Page” drop-down menu in the future, you’ll see your new cover page template in the “General” section. Click to insert it just like you would one of Word’s built-in cover pages.
And that’s it. Creating custom cover pages for your document is pretty easy once you know where to look.
