Guest column by Coleta Bratten

My district used to spend $1,100 to $1,800 a year purchasing soil stewardship education materials. By printing these materials at the office, we save a lot of money and are able to keep the stewardship program going in our county. Currently, we print and distribute bookmarks, placemats, and teachers’ guides (black and white, one booklet for each teacher in their level) to our local schools. In addition to school materials, we print one litany for each church in our area, and either deliver or mail materials to local nursing homes and senior citizens centers, as well.

To help districts print their own education materials, I’ve written out the follow guide for downloading and printing PDFs from NACD’s Marketplace. I’d also be happy to visit with anyone about how we do our program to get it started in your conservation district – my contact information is below.

For instructions on how to print booklets using Microsoft Word, click here.

A District’s Guide to Printing NACD Stewardship Materials

1. First, order your desired stewardship materials off NACD’s Marketplace. To do this, you’ll have to create a username and password for NACD’s website. If you don’t already have an account, never fear – once you put an item in your cart and go to checkout, you’ll be prompted to login or register if you already have an account set up.

2. Once ordered, your materials will arrive in your email inbox shortly.

3. Once you receive and open that email, click to download the booklet or material desired. Once downloaded, the file should appear in your Downloads Folder on our computer, or wherever you elected to save it to.

4. Go to your downloaded files and find the booklet or material you would like to print. It will be in PDF format. Right click on the file, or open it up, and save it (or export it) as a JPEG or JPG file. Converting the file format will save each page of the original PDF separately as JPG or JPEG files.

5. Open up your Publisher application on your computer.

6. Select “more blank pages” then tabloid landscape 11×17 or 8.5×14 legal.

7. You should now have one page showing on the left side. Two pages of NACD’s booklets will fit on one 11×17 or legal size page. You will have to adjust each set of two pages to fit right on the 11 x17 or legal size. This sometimes takes printing the whole booklet out, since your pages don’t look like they will match. You can add as many pages as needed. Simply click insert page and the added page will appear in the top left hand corner of your Publisher window.

For your first page, insert booklet page 8 on the left and booklet page 1 on the right. On the second page, insert booklet page 2 on the left and booklet page 7 on the right. On the third page, insert page 6 on the left and booklet page 3 on the right. On the fourth page, insert booklet page 4 on the left and booklet page 5 on the right.

8. If you are ready for printing, load your 11×17 or legal paper into your printer. Before you print, select “print on both sides – flip sheets on short side.

9. Hit print!

Coleta Bratten is a member of the NACD Stewardship Committee and district manager for the Dewey County Conservation District in Oklahoma. She can be reached by email at deweyccd[at]conservation.ok.gov.

Tags: printing