How to Make a Brochure or Pamphlet in Google Docs

You don't need to hire an ad agency to design a few pamphlets for your latest campaign. Google Docs is free and accessible, with simple methods for creating a great brochure on your own.

Google Docs may not have much in the way of brochure templates, but customizing a template to fit your needs is simple. You can also create a tri-fold pamphlet yourself, or use a third-party template to make it even easier. Let's get started.

This gives a pretty decent brochure with proper margins and a nice layout. You can start printing these out if you are satisfied, or customize them further.

You can easily edit a template to add any written or visual content you want, but what about formatting the page itself? That's easy too.

Open any brochure template and select File > Page Setup. Here you can customize all aspects of your pamphlet's page formatting.

The page orientation is set to Portrait by default, which is ideal for simple brochures. For creating a tri-fold brochure, however, you need the horizontal layout of the Landscape orientation.

The existing margins leave sufficient space on all sides, but you can always adjust them to your personal requirements. It's generally not a good idea to remove margins entirely unless your layout already leaves enough empty space at the edges.

Clicking on the drop-down menu below Page Size brings down a list of page sizes. Each entry has a name and dimensions in inches. Letter is usually the right option, though feel free to pick any other size from the list.

Google Docs brochure templates have a white background, but that doesn't mean you have to stick to it. Promotional materials can benefit from some background color, and pamphlets are no exception.

The Google Docs template gallery is great for multi page business brochures, but you will not find any templates for the far more common tri-fold pamphlet. Instead, you can create one yourself with a simple tweak.

Depending on your inserted images and general design, you may want to play around with the page and the column margins until they match up nicely. Then just print out the pamphlets and start folding.

You can use the same process to create a bi-fold pamphlet as well. Just pick the double-column option in step five and adjust your margins accordingly.

Google Docs templates can be pretty bland, and there aren't even that many to choose from. If you don't have any cool design ideas in mind, try starting out with a third-party template.

There are many websites offering brochure templates for Google Docs. For this tutorial, we are going to try out a brochure design from GooDocs

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The site offers an incredible variety of pamphlet designs for absolutely no cost, covering all kinds of business needs. Templates compatible with Google Docs will sport its blue icon and can be imported directly.

Customizing a Google Docs brochure template with your own content and formatting is the most straightforward way of creating a pamphlet. Whether you need a two-page brochure or a trifold pamphlet, you can create them both yourself.

That being said, it might be easier to import a third-party template that already has these features. You can copy a nice trifold template from a site like GooDocs and just edit the content.

This allows you to use any Google Docs add-ons you need and save the document to your own Google Drive. Keep an eye on the margins, and start printing the pamphlets when you are satisfied.

Levin Roy is a software engineer who loves writing about technology. Whether it is Windows tips-and-tricks or in-depth guides about application development, Levin uses his practical experience and technical skills to create articles that can help solve tricky problems. Read Levin's Full Bio