The complete guide to putting a letterhead in Microsoft Word

A letterhead in Microsoft Word sounds like it should be simple. In practice it is one of those small tasks that quietly eats an afternoon, because almost every instinct you have about how to do it is slightly wrong. This guide covers the whole subject properly: what a letterhead actually is inside a Word file, where it should live, the three real ways to create one, and the details — page size, continuation headers, file format, team rollout — that separate a letterhead that works from one that falls apart the first time someone forwards it.

What "a letterhead in Word" really means

A letterhead is the fixed identity at the top — and often the bottom — of a sheet of correspondence: the name, the logo or monogram, the address block, sometimes a rule or a footer line. The letter is the variable part: the date, the recipient, the body, the signature.

The mistake that causes most letterhead problems is treating those two things as one. People paste a logo into the body of the document, type the address beneath it, and start the letter under that. It looks right on screen. Then the body text grows, everything reflows, the second page has no letterhead at all, and a colleague who opens the file sees the logo sitting in a different place.

A letterhead done correctly keeps the fixed part and the variable part strictly separate. Word has a native mechanism for exactly this, and it has had it since the 1990s: the header and footer.

Why the header and footer are the right home

Anything placed in a Word document's header repeats on every page automatically. The footer does the same at the bottom. The body text flows in the space between them and never collides with them, because Word reserves that space through the page margins.

That is precisely the behaviour a letterhead needs:

• The artwork stays in one position on every page, including pages two, three, and beyond.
• Editing the body — the actual letter — cannot move or delete the letterhead.
• The file carries the letterhead with it. Forward it, and the recipient sees the same thing you do.

Everything else in this guide is, in one way or another, about getting your letterhead into that header and footer correctly.

The three ways to create a letterhead in Word

There are exactly three. Which one is right depends entirely on whether you already have a designed letterhead.

Method 1 — Build it from scratch in Word

If you have no logo, no commissioned identity, and no plan to get one, building directly in Word is the sensible path. Set custom margins (a 1.75-inch top margin leaves room for header artwork), open Insert → Header → Blank, and lay out your name and address. Add a footer if you need one. Then save it as a template so it can be reused — more on file formats below.

Done with care this takes about half an hour and produces something serviceable. It will not have real kerning, foil simulation, or the typographic polish of a designed identity, because Word is a word processor, not a design tool. For many businesses that trade-off is acceptable. Our walkthrough on how to make a letterhead in Word covers this path step by step.

Method 2 — Manually place a designed PDF into the header

If you do have a designed letterhead, it almost certainly arrived as a PDF. The manual route is to crop the PDF down to just the header artwork, export that crop as a high-resolution image, insert it into Word's header, anchor it to the page, and repeat for the footer.

This works, and it produces the correct result — artwork as a flat image, locked in the header. It also takes 30 to 45 minutes when it goes smoothly, and it does not always go smoothly. The anchoring step in particular is fiddly, and getting it wrong means the artwork drifts when the body reflows. The full procedure is in our guide to inserting a PDF into a Word header the right way.

Method 3 — Convert the designed PDF automatically

The third method does Method 2's work for you. You upload the letterhead PDF, set the crop with a couple of sliders in a live preview, and download a Word file with the artwork already placed in the header and footer and the body margins already set. It takes about a minute, and because it runs in the browser the PDF is never uploaded anywhere.

This is what Letterhead Lab does. The rest of this guide assumes you have a letterhead in Word — by whichever method — and covers the details that decide whether it actually holds up.

Page size: US Letter or A4

A letterhead is built for a specific paper size, and Word documents have a page size too. If the two disagree, the letter prints with shifted margins and artwork creeping toward an edge.

North American correspondence uses US Letter — 8.5 by 11 inches. Most of the rest of the world uses A4 — 210 by 297 millimetres. If your correspondence stays domestic, a US Letter letterhead is all you need. If you write to the UK, Europe, Australia, or Asia, you need an A4 version as well — and ideally both from one source, so the design is identical on either size.

Multi-page letters and the continuation header

A letterhead designed for a single page looks wrong when it repeats at full size on page six of a long letter. The full logo and address block crowding the top of every page is not how formal multi-page correspondence is done.

The convention is the continuation header: the full letterhead appears on page one, and pages two onward carry a slimmer version — often just the organisation's name, a reference, or a thin rule. Word supports this through its "different first page" setting for headers and footers. Configured correctly, page one gets the full letterhead and every page after gets the continuation header, automatically, however long the letter runs.

Setting that up by hand is one of the more error-prone parts of the manual method. A multi-page letterhead conversion builds it in for you, with the continuation header's height adjustable in the preview.

File format: .docx versus .dotx

Word has two relevant file types, and the difference matters once more than one person is involved.

A .docx is an ordinary document. Open it and you are editing that file. If your letterhead lives in a .docx on a shared drive, sooner or later someone types their letter straight into it and saves over the master.

A .dotx is a template. Double-click it and Word does not open that file — it opens a new, untitled copy based on it. The master is never touched. For any letterhead used by more than one person, the .dotx template format is the safer choice.

Rolling a letterhead out to a team

A letterhead is only as good as the team's ability to use the right one. The pattern that works is straightforward:

1. One person — operations, an assistant, or IT — creates the letterhead file once, by whichever of the three methods fits.
2. Save it as a .dotx template in a single shared location: a network drive, a SharePoint library, or Word's Custom Office Templates folder.
3. Everyone writes letters by opening that template. Word gives each person a fresh copy; nobody rebuilds anything.
4. When the letterhead changes — a rebrand, a new address — the same owner reconverts or rebuilds it and replaces the template. Existing letters are untouched.

This is exactly how a law firm manages its letterhead across associates, and how a family office hands a template from the chief of staff to the principals. The full team workflow — storage, governance, updates — is covered in our guide to Word letterhead templates for teams.

The mistakes that cause most letterhead problems

A short list, because almost every broken letterhead traces back to one of these:

• Artwork pasted into the body instead of the header. It will not repeat on later pages and it moves when the text reflows.
• An embedded PDF object instead of a flat image. It renders only where Acrobat is installed and breaks when forwarded.
• The image not anchored to the page. It drifts as the body grows.
• Page size mismatched to the design. Margins shift and artwork creeps to an edge.
• A shared .docx with no .dotx. The master gets overwritten.
• Recreating a designed letterhead in Word by hand. Two hours of work to produce something worse than the PDF you started with.

Avoid those six and your letterhead will behave.

Which method should you use?

If you have no designed letterhead, build one in Word and save it as a .dotx. If you have a designed PDF and enjoy a fiddly 45-minute task, the manual method works. If you have a designed PDF and would rather spend a minute, convert it.

In every case, the destination is the same — artwork in the header and footer, a clean body, the right page size, and a .dotx if more than one person will use it. Get those right and a letterhead in Word stops being an afternoon's work and becomes something you set up once.