You can also easily include important date and time information.

You can work with headers and footers in Page Layout view by choosing ViewPage Layout or clicking the Page Layout button in the Layout tab of the Office 2011 for Mac Ribbon.

Similarly, you can move the cursor over the white space near the bottom of a page to add or format a footer.

Youre in the left, right, or center region, depending on where you double-click.

For example, use Insert Page Number and Insert Number of Pages with additional text like this: Page Page of Pages to print Page of.

James Gordon is a Microsoft MVP for Macintosh, creator of the InsertPicture add-in for Mac PowerPoint, and an Office trainer.

If youre willing to go the extra mile and learn the ins and outs of this raster image tool, the payoff will be worth the learning curve.

Your business will need professional correspondence, marketing materials, flyers, and much more.

But for some businesses, dropping the cash for a page layout app isnt feasible.

Fortunately, for those needing affordable solutions, there are plenty of page layout tools to choose from.

I have gathered five such tools that should meet the needs for most users.

With them, youll be creating high-quality color pages that will help bring your business a professional look with ease.

Lets examine these low-cost tools and see if one or two of them will meet your needs.

Page Layouts Excel Software Features Everything

This amazing piece of software features everything youll need to create incredible pages.

In fact, even some publishing houses are putting Scribus to good use.

Why Because of features like color separations, CMYK and spot colors, ICC color management, and versatile PDF creation.

Figure A.

Its interface is more user-friendly than most of the competition.

Lucidpress.

Its a free service, and when you use it on the Chromebook, you can seamlessly integrate it with Google Drive.

For example, youre limited to 25MB storage space, you cant access the premium template library, and theres no revision history or local backups.

Page Layouts Excel Upgrade To The

You can upgrade to the Basic account (for 7.95month) and add those features to your account.

Figure B Lucidpress includes templates for creating newsletters (paper or digital), brochures, annual reports, flyers, and pamphlets.

Youll also find collaboration features, such as document sharing and real-time chat.

Lucidpress can be used to create printed or digital campaigns for marketing -- so its more than just your average page layout tool.

LibreOffice LibreOffice ( Figure C ) is not an official page layout tool, but its ideal for anyone whos familiar with office suites but doesnt want to spend time learning a full-blown desktop layout program.

LibreOffice allows you to easily insert images, manage columns, work with tables, and export to PDF format.

Figure C Although you wont be manipulating the layout as granularly as you can with the likes of Scribus, LibreOffice will most certainly work in a pinch -- and do a fine job.

In fact, LibreOffice also includes LibreOffice Draw, which will help you work with images to be included in your documents.

LibreOffice is free and available for Linux, Windows, and Mac (and soon to be available for Android).

GIMP GIMP ( Figure D ) is a free image-editing tool.

But it offers so much power, you can easily use it to create amazing layouts and even export them as PDF documents.

And since GIMP is all about image editing, you can also use it to create some phenomenal graphics along with your text.

Figure D GIMP lets you add text, apply effects to it, reshape it, and much more.

Page Layouts Excel For Mac