Author: Kay

Planning a summer wedding? How about a retirement, birthday party, just a fun get-together? Make sure your guests set aside the day of the event by sending out save the date cards well in advance.

My business card sized, full-color save the date cards are the latest addition to FreePrintableBusinessCards.net. They’re easy to customize and print from home or office, with no need to custom order anything or visit a stationery store. Of course, if you want to pick up some Avery business card stock (perforated or not), you can save a little time and effort that way. Otherwise, just print on regular cardstock or paper, cut apart, and you’re good to go!

Several of the designs are wedding-themed, while many would work for engagement parties, retirements and other events. Some variations include a month’s calendar, so you can just circle or otherwise emphasize the day of the special event.

There are 30 save the date cards altogether, with flowers, starbursts, swirls, wedding graphics and other designs. Just download and type in the information about your event and guests of honor.

Like the rest of the more than 1,000 cards at FreePrintableBusinessCards.net, the save the date cards are free to download, customize and print using Microsoft Word. If you’d like the ability to edit out the site URL at the bottom of the cards, the premium version is just $3 per design.

Summer time is family time, and I already have one family reunion under my belt this year. Our daughters got to spend time with their cousins and my wife and I caught up on all the goings-on in our extended family.

Because my wife is a genealogy buff, I’m fortunate enough to have a good record of our family trees – both on my side and her side. The kids love looking at the tree

I recently added several new family trees ancestor charts, and research forms to FamilyTreeTemplates.net. There are new variations for children, teachers, genealogists, and hobbyists.

Because I know that there are many ways to make a family, I’ve been sure to include nontraditional trees for stepfamilies and adoptive families (including an adoptive family tree that includes biological parent “roots” for open adoptions, adoptions out of foster care, and other circumstances.)

The family trees are perfect for school and home research, and there are more than 60 styles in all, from cute teddy bears to elaborate fan charts. They’re free as PDFs you can print out and write on, or $4 per design for a version you can open and type into using Microsoft Word.

It’s almost Independence Day here in the United States, and there are lots of patriotic printables to choose from at the various FreePrintable.net sites. Whether you’re heading to a picnic or potluck, setting off fireworks, attending a political event, or honoring soldiers this July 4, I hope you’ll find just the right printable.

For the kids, there are lots of Independence Day coloring pages at FreePrintableColoringPages.net as well as state flag coloring pages and U.S. history coloring pages.

FreePrintableRecipeCards.net has a firecracker recipe card for sharing your favorite Independence Day recipes.

For businesses, community leaders, or anyone wishing to share their patriotism, there’s a matching set of flag stationery, flag business cards, and flag address labels.

At FreePrintableCertificates.net, there’s a flag-embellished Certificate of Achievement, as well as certificates with yellow ribbons to indicate that an individual or business supports the troops or served in the military.

Enjoy the printables, and have a safe and happy Fourth!

I must be some kind of “card shark.” I recently added 25 new greeting cards to FreePrintableGreetingCards.net and I noticed that there are now nearly 200 cards on the site!

The new card designs include sports, monster, retro 1960s, butterflies, flowers, party, tropical, cowboy, dinosaur, outer space, cat, and even sushi. There are printable cards for birthdays and anniversaries as well as thank you cards. They’re all full-color, of course, so make you have a good ink cartridge in your printer.

This sword-wielding pirate says, “Argh! Check out the new cards!” Oh, no, wait. He says, “Happy Birthday!”

The cards are available in two versions: a free PDF or a $4 DOC that can be customized in Microsoft Word. Both download instantly.

One of the newest FreePrintable.net sites comes just in time for summer vacations: PrintableLuggageTags.com, offering 30 printable luggage tags, all free to print. There are fun, colorful and sophisticated designs, and print out 10 per page on Avery business card stock, regular cardstock or heavy paper.

You can tuck these into a luggage tag holder, binder, or wallet, or laminate one and attach it to something, and make it much more likely that your belongings will get back to you.

There are simple designs, themes such as animals or sports, and several multicolor flower illustrations. There are 10 tags on each page, and most versions have the same design repeated 10 times. There is also a set of 10 animal luggage tags, which are perfect for animal-loving travelers as well as pet carriers.

All of the luggage tags are free. With the PDF download, you write your name and contact info in by hand, or, opt for the DOC version and type it in using Microsoft Word.

Have you ever gone to print a printable and had a message pop up saying something about the image being “outside the printable area?” Or, maybe the printer accepted the PDF or DOC, only to print it out with the top and bottom edges cut off, like this flash cards example from PrintableFlashCards.net:

Different printers handle edges differently, so edges might get cut off on one model but not another. But in almost all cases, there are a few quick-and-easy tweaks you can make on your end so the page is printing as designed and intended.

On a Mac, you can scale a PDF using the Print Screen or Print dialog box. Select the percentage you’d like the item to print at — 90% is a good guess.

On a PC, you may see a “Page Scaling” drop-down menu with choices such as “Shrink to Fit Printable Area.”

Sometimes Adobe Reader will “fix” PDFs automatically, fitting them to the printable area. With Microsoft Word documents, you can often adjust the Preferences in the Print dialog box on a case-by-case basis. Depending on what kind of printer you have, you may need to mess with the process a bit, but I’m confident you can get the printables coming out the way you want them. (If you’re concerned about ink and paper waste, you may want to practice on the reverse side of an already-used sheet of paper, and/or set your printer settings to grayscale or draft.)

School’s out (or almost, depending on where you live), but for most teachers there is but a brief respite before they need to jump back in to lesson plans and other prep work for the coming school year. I really appreciate my daughters’ teachers (I have one girl in preschool and one graduating middle school), and am always on the lookout for new classroom printables to add to TeachersPrintables.net.

I recently added 14 new printables to the site, and they range from academic goal-setting charts and answer sheets to hall passes and welcome signs. The multiple choice and true/false answer sheets are convenient templates that teachers can use to aid in quizzes and tests. There’s also a book report form, report title page and instructor evaluation.

Many of the classroom printables are not just for teachers in a traditional school setting. They can also be used by homeschooling parents, students, and, in some cases, child care providers. (The new additions include forms where a teacher can report that a boy or girl had “a great day.”)

Everything at TeachersPrintables.net is free to download and print one at a time (Teachers are on a tight budget, I know), and most are available in your choice of PDF or DOC format; the latter can be edited and customized in Microsoft Word. I have another option, for those who want to download the forms all at once and have them on hand to print and copy again and again: and all-in-one download teachers printables collection that is $27 for a single classroom license or $67 for a whole-school license. The collection comes with more than a dozen bonus printables, such as graph and penmanship paper and calendars.

Father’s Day has taken on a whole new meaning now that I have kids of my own. I love getting homemade gifts and being spoiled all day long. I’ve made sure to add more and more Father’s Day printables to the FreePrintable.net sites over the years, and I wanted to give you a roundup of some of my favorites.

There’s a nice selection of Father’s Day cards at FreePrintableGreetingCards.net, as well as Father’s Day gift tags at FreePrintableGiftTags.net. And what dad wouldn’t love a World’s Best Dad certificate available at FreePrintableCertificates.net? Suitable for framing! In my case, I think I’m probably in the running for World’s Goofiest Dad.

There are also three cute Father’s Day coloring pages at FreePrintableColoringPages.net. They’re great for kids to color and slip into a special card for Dad.

However you’re planning to celebrate this Father’s Day, save yourself money and a trip to the store with free and low-cost printables!

I’ve added two new features to InstantResumeTemplates.com: There are now resume objectives, along with articles on how to use them. Also, there’s a new category for the skills matrix, which is a hiring and evaluating tool of use to employees, business owners and managers.

Skills matrices are simple and quick to put together, and can be a very handy tool for gauging the abilities and worth of your employees or potential employees.

Essentially, a skills matrix is a table that outlines the employees or interviewees in one column, along with certain skills you expect a person in a certain position to have. In most skills matrices, the employees or interviewees are listed down the left column, with the skills listed across the top of the page. For each skill, you can make an “X” or a check to indicate that the employee or interviewee has that skill. Or you may choose to use a ratings system, and give the person a 1-5 (one being the best, five being the worst) for his/her ability in that particular area.

For instance, if you’re making a skills matrix for your IT department, you might have categories such as “database administration” or “support.” Your employee, Joe Schmo, is fantastic at database administration, so you would put a “5” in that box. Maybe he’s only so-so at support, so you would give him a “3” there.

The simplicity of the skills matrix makes it easy to glance at and know exactly what you’re getting from each person. If you had a project coming up that would rely heavily on administration, and not so much on support, you might look at your matrix and determine that Joe Schmo is the guy for the job. If you have a project that needs someone strong in support, your matrix would tell you that there might be someone better suited for the job.

Skills matrices can be used in any field, for any number of employees. A small business would benefit from the simplicity of a skills matrix, but even a larger corporation can create such a system and use it as a means of determining which employees are flourishing in which categories. And if you’re simply interviewing candidates, a skills matrix can be just one more tool you use to evaluate which person will the ideal fit for your company.