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05 February 2011
Making your own personalized recipe cards in Microsoft Word is fairly simple. In this tutorial, which I wrote in response to a member’s request, I will show you how to configure your page layout and margins and insert text fields so that you can start printing your own recipe cards.
Once you’ve launched MS Word, the first step is to define page dimensions that correspond with your recipe cardstock. Typically, recipe cards come in 3x5 inch or 4x6 inch formats. To set your page dimensions, select “Page Layout” from the menu.
Click on the “Size” button in the “Page Setup” group and select the “More Paper Sizes” option at the bottom of the drop down menu.
In the “Page Setup” dialog, on the “Paper” tab, type in the width and height that corresponds with the size of recipe cards you will be using (5x3 or 6x4) and click “OK”.
Again, from the menu, click the “Margins” button and select the “Narrow” option from the drop down menu.
To add a few fancy and functional touches to your recipe card layout, we can add customized text fields for your title, ingredients and directions. To do this, click on the “Insert” tab on you ribbon menu and click the “Text Box” button.
From the “Text Box” drop down, select the “Draw Text Box” option at the bottom.
Draw a rectangular selection at the top of your recipe card document.
From the “Format” tab on your ribbon Menu, type in 5” or 4” in the width field of the “Size” group (1” narrower than the width of your recipe card) and .4” in the height field.
Click on the “Position” button and select the “Center” with text wrapping option.
You can add custom outline, fill and shadow colors and styles from the “Text Box Styles” group. You can configure these individually or select one of the predefined styles.
For this tutorial, I’ve applied the “Compound Outline – Accent 6” predefined style.
Make your way back to the “Insert” tab on the ribbon menu and click the “Text Box” button once again. This time, we will be drawing a text box to list our ingredients. Draw a rough rectangular selection on the left side of your recipe card layout.
For this particular text box, from the “Format” tab on our ribbon menu, we’ll set the height at 2.6” and width at 2” (1.9” x 1.6 for a 3x5 recipe card). Again, you can configure shape, fill and shadow styles and colors as you see fit.
We will draw one last text box, this time for directions, by repeating the last 2 steps. This time, we will set our text box dimensions to 2.6” for height and 2.9” for width (1.9”x2.4” for the 3x5 recipe card).
Depending on your particular outline, fill and shadow settings, your recipe card should look something like this…
We now want to define text formats for each of our new text boxes. Click once in your title text box (the first one we created) and select the “Home” tab from the ribbon menu. Here you can define which font, font size, color and attributes you would like to apply to your recipe title. Of course, you can also use one of the many predefined styles from the “Styles” group. I am using the “Book Title” style.
In the left hand text box, type the word “Ingredients” and press Enter. You can modify the font, size, color and attributes of this as well. On the next line, apply bullets by clicking the “Bullets” button from the “Paragraph” group in the menu. Also, as space is limited, you may want to click the “Decrease Indent” button, also from the “Paragraph” group to move the bullets nearer the left edge of your text box.
We do the same for the right hand text box, only this time, instead of bullets, we will apply numbering.
I’ve set my font to Times New Roman and font size to 8 pts for both boxes. You now have a recipe card template that is ready to fill and print.
If you want to save this as a template that you can use over and over again, select “File>Save As>Word Template”. This will save your file in .dotx format. If you prefer, you can download and use free Microsoft Word recipe card templates I’ve created by selecting the size you need below.
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