CASE STUDY No. 9711
KEY WORDS LETTERHEAD, REVISIONS TO; COPIER PAPER
County of Alameda
General Services Agency
Purchasing Department
1401 Lakeside Drive, Suite 1106
Oakland, CA 94612
Contact: Elizabeth Eckl, Recycling Coordinator. Tel: 510-208-9629.
Fax: 510-208-9530. E-Mail: eeckl@gsa.mail.co.alameda.ca.us
Summary
By incorporating the county seal and other letterhead information in revisable Word Perfect templates, local government agency is able to print correspondence, memos, and other documents on plain paper, avoiding the cost of printing letterhead and the waste invariably associated with making changes to letterhead and other office forms--new telephone numbers or new personnel names and titles, for example.
Action
To conserve paper and reduce the cost of printing letterhead, memo forms, and other stock stationery items, the General Services Agency of the County of Alameda, Calif. (the Oakland area) stores printer templates in Word 6.0 for Windows. The illustration at right shows, for example, the template for letterhead, including the county seal and name at top, and routine address and telephone numbers at bottom. To produce a letter, the operator selects the appropriate template from storage (the computer screen might appear as in the lower illustration) and then routinely keystrokes the contents, which are merged with the template and printed on blank paper. Template design can be changed at any time. Word 6.0 uses the term normal template, meaning the default template that stores elements such as styles, AutoText, and macros.
"When a document is based on a template, it contains all information to produce a specific type of document; for example, headers, footers, boiler text, and styles," quoting an instructional manual for Word 6.0.
Payback
The main cost to adopt such a change in office procedure is staff time for designing
templates and instructing workers in their use. Although no specific information about
cost reduction is available, Alameda County GSA believes the use of laser-printer
templates as a substitute for conventional forms printing is significant in terms of waste
prevention and cost control.