A family office is, among other things, a correspondence operation. Trust distributions, grant letters, board notes, a principal's personal reply — each goes out as a letter, and each is read by someone who notices the paper it arrived on. This guide is about getting that paper right in Microsoft Word: not one letterhead, but the small set a family office actually uses, each converted so it stays correct every time.
A family office sends letters under several names
The first thing to be clear about is that "the family office letterhead" is rarely one thing. A well-run office writes under several identities, and they are not interchangeable:
- The trust has its own letterhead for estate and distribution correspondence.
- The foundation has another for grant letters and acknowledgements.
- The operating family business has a letterhead distinct from both, for board and shareholder letters.
- The principal has a personal monogram for private notes that should not look like company mail.
Each is a deliberate signal. A grant award on the foundation's letterhead, a trustee's letter on the trust's, a principal's thank-you on a personal monogram — using the right one is part of running the office with care. Putting them into Word is really four small jobs, not one.
Why the letterhead usually exists only as a PDF
Almost every family office hits the same wall. The letterhead — often engraved, often designed years ago — exists only as a PDF. It came from a stationer or a designer, it looks immaculate, and it cannot be typed into. A PDF is a finished picture of a page, not an editable document.
So the letter gets built another way. Someone recreates the letterhead at the top of a Word file, pastes in a logo image, rebuilds the address block by hand. It works, roughly, and then it drifts: a mark nudged out of position, a serif font Word silently substitutes, a margin a few points off. For correspondence whose whole job is to look composed, that quiet drift is the problem.
Converting each letterhead into Word
The fix is to stop rebuilding and start converting. Letterhead Lab takes the PDF and produces a Word .docx with the artwork locked into Word's header and footer — where a letterhead belongs — and a clean, editable body between them.
The mark is kept as a high-resolution image, not redrawn, so an engraved monogram looks exactly as the engraver made it. Because the artwork lives in the header, it repeats automatically on a long letter and cannot be knocked loose while the body is edited. Whoever administers the office converts each PDF once and keeps the results with the office's templates. From then on, writing a letter means opening the right template and typing — the letterhead is already correct.
Keeping the set straight
The discipline that makes this work is converting each letterhead separately, into its own file:
- Trust correspondence letterhead — for estate and distribution letters.
- Foundation letterhead — for grant and acknowledgement letters.
- Family-business letterhead — for board and shareholder letters.
- Principal monogram letterhead — for personal correspondence.
The Multi-page bundle converts several letterheads in one pass, each as a distinct Word file, and adds .dotx templates so a master is never overwritten by accident. For an office juggling four marks, that is the version to take.
A note on engraved and embossed marks
Family-office stationery is often engraved or embossed, and the common worry is that conversion will flatten or redraw it. It does not. The conversion crops the PDF and places the artwork as an image — what the engraver produced is what Word shows.
The tactile quality is a property of the printed paper, so for the physical version the office still orders from its stationer. The Word file is the editable counterpart — the same artwork, for letters that are typed and emailed.
Where to start
Pick the letterhead the office sends most — usually the trust or the business — and convert that PDF first. Confirm the crop and the body start position in the preview, save the file with the office's templates, and write the next letter from it. Then do the others.
See the family office overview for how each letterhead is handled, or the complete PDF-to-Word conversion guide for the mechanics.