Today, we’re going to create a Microsoft Outlook email signature using Microsoft Word.
The first thing we need to do is download the Email Signature Gallery available in Microsoft Office Templates.
After it downloads, click the Word file to open the template. It will look like this:
Click “Enable Editing” to view all of the different email signatures you can choose.
When you find a signature you like, all you have to do is copy and paste it into a new, blank Word document.
Once you have pasted it into your Word document, you can modify it by replacing the example template’s information with your own. You can easily do this by selecting and deleting the information you want to replace and then typing in your information.
Because you are creating this in Microsoft Word, you can modify the signature text exactly the way you want it. You can change the font color, size, and formatting of each signature line just as you would any other text in a Microsoft Word document.
If you have chosen a template that includes a picture, you can easily change the picture by right-clicking on it and clicking “change picture”, as seen below.
From here, you can select where to choose the picture location. If you have saved a picture on your computer that you want to use, you can select “From a File”, which will bring up the file locations on your computer that you can choose.
Once you have chosen your picture, it will replace the original picture with yours. From here, you may want to make changes to the picture.
In our example, we want to crop the picture. To do this, you will click on “Picture Format” at the top of the document and then click “crop” as shown below.
Once you crop the picture down to the size you want, you can leave it this shape or crop it into a different one.
To crop it to a shape, simply go back to the “crop” button, but instead of clicking the button, click the arrow below “crop” for different actions you can choose.
For this example, we will choose “crop to shape”, which will bring up the different shapes as seen below.
Once you have chosen a shape for your picture, you can continue editing it or leave it the way it is. One of the ways you can edit it is by changing the picture style and adding a frame or shadow to your picture.
When you’re happy with your picture, you can continue replacing the information on the example with your own.
All you have to do is highlight the information you want to change and then type in your information, the same way we did when we changed our name and title earlier in this example.
You can also change the social media icons if you want them to look different. Just as we changed our headshot in this signature, we can click on the social media icon and right-click to change the picture from a saved file.
There are many social media icons you can find and save online for free. Social media icons are updated regularly. The Twitter icon, for example, started as a lowercase “t” but has now evolved into the bird icon. Find these icons online and save them to use in your signature instead of the icons included in the original template.
To link your social media accounts to each icon, you will right-click on the icon and click “edit link”, and it will open up a window that looks like this:
Type your social media address for the icon you have selected into the bottom of the window where the text is highlighted. You can also copy and paste the URL directly from the website if you don’t want to type it in.
You can see the website link appear when you hover over the icon. This is an easy way to know that your website has linked to the social media icon.
You can make as many or as few changes as you want to the signature at this time. Once the signature looks the way you want it, select the signature and copy it by right-clicking “copy” or using the ctrl + C keyboard shortcut.
Now you will need to open Microsoft Outlook to save your design as a signature in Outlook.
After opening Outlook, click “new email” to open a new email. Then, click “signatures’” and then “new” to create a new signature.
When you click “new,” you will need to name your signature before proceeding.
Now, you will have a blank signature box to paste your signature. You can use the shortcut Ctrl + V or by right-clicking “paste”.
Click “OK”, and your signature is added to the blank email message you have opened.
You can create multiple signatures in Outlook if you want to. If you have multiple signatures and want to choose a different one for your email message, click the arrow under the “signature” tab, and you can choose which signature line you want to use.
The last thing to point out is that you can make changes to your signature directly in the email as you were making in Microsoft Word. As you can see in the image below, you have all of the same options to edit the picture and text within your signature.
Conclusion
We hope this tutorial has helped you learn how to easily create a Microsoft Outlook signature using Microsoft Word. You can create as many signatures as you want and save them in your Microsoft Outlook signatures for you to use in the future using this simple method.
