Using the QuickBooks 2019 Layout Designer – Part 2

Watch the QuickBooks 2019 video tutorial about Layout Designer. We will continue customizing invoice. Learn how to add the text box and data field, how to adjust the height, width, and size of text boxes and columns.

Hey. Let’s go ahead and finish talking about the Layout Designer. I wanted to go ahead and show you the rest of the options you have available when you’re working in this particular window.

The next options, I wanted to talk to you about are these ones that say Make Same. You’ve got height, width, and size. Notice, they’re grayed out right now because I don’t have at least two objects selected.

These options will let you take multiple objects and make them the same height, which is up and down, width which is across, or the size which is both.

Let me give you an example of how this would work!

I’m going to go ahead and just move this over out of the way for a minute. Let’s say, I want to take these. and these! If you notice they’re not the same width, but I’d like them all to be the same width.

What I’m going to do first, is select all four of these objects. A quick way to select them is to do something called drawing a net. All you do is put your mouse out to the side somewhere and hold it down the whole time and drag a box around them.

When you let go they’ll all be selected. Now, you’ll notice these are available. I’m going to choose the width option. Now, if you notice, they’re all the same width.

I’m going to take these and just move them over just a little bit. Maybe up a little bit on my screen so it looks a little bit nicer. But that’s how you use those height, width, and size options.

Now let me go ahead and move this over a little bit so it doesn’t look quite so funny here. I’ll try to line these up.

The next thing you’ll see is that you have the ability to center horizontally. Now, what that means is, if I wanted to center this picture on my page horizontally, I could! I would select it, and choose that option. But, you can see in this case it looks a little funny. So, I’m going to go ahead and undo and put it back where it was.

Your last options, you have up here are to zoom in or out. You can see you can zoom in if you want. That’s as far as it’ll let you zoom in and you can zoom back out if you’d like.

Let’s go look at some things down at the bottom portion of the screen.

Obviously, these right here!  You would actually select them, and move them around, make them the same size. Whatever you’d like to do with those. So, this will take a little bit of working with.

But, when you get down here! I wanted to show you that the description column is the widest column here. If you actually printed this out you would see that you have a lot of extra room in these columns.

One of the things you can do, is you can place your mouse on this line that goes up and down between your columns, and move those very similar to the way you would move an Excel spreadsheet. That way if you needed to have a lot more room in your description area you’ve got it.

The other thing you’ll notice is if you look at quantity, for example, the one is way over to the right. You may want to center that. You have the ability to go to your Properties and actually choose the Center option and click OK. Now, you’ll see that that one is in the center of the column. I’d probably do that with all of these.

Down at the bottom, you have your message area. Then, you have subtotal, sales tax, total, payments and credits, and balance due.

You would actually end up working with these if you wanted to take out sales tax, for example, or if you wanted to take out the payments and credits. You would just delete those. Then, move these boxes around the way you want them to look.

That’s pretty much where your options are for the Layout Designer. It is going to take a little bit of time to get in here and work with these.

You will click OK several times and go and look at it and realize you need to make some changes. But once you get it looking good then you are good to go.

I’m going to go ahead and click OK here, and show you what it looks like if I have to use it. Let me go ahead and click OK here all the way back out.

Now, I’m going to go back to a previous invoice and I’m going to come over to the template option and choose my invoice. I’m going to go up to the Print and preview this so you can see what it’s going to look like. And there it is!

So you can see, I would need to move some things over because it does need a little bit of tweaking, but you want yours to stand out so go ahead and make any changes you want, add pictures. That’s all you need to do!

Well, that’s going to wrap up module ten here. Why don’t we go ahead and move over to module eleven and we’ll start talking a little bit about working with the different reports that are in QuickBooks.

Cindy McGuckin

Cindy McGuckin is an IT trainer with over 20 years of experience. Cindy currently manages the IT Training Department at Trident Technical College, she's a Member of the Association of IT Professionals, Charleston, SC chapter and the Treasurer of the South Carolina Association of Continuing Higher Education. Cindy is a Microsoft Office and QuickBooks expert and her online courses have received hundreds of 5-star reviews. Her no-nonsense approach to teaching complicated topics makes her classes engaging and interesting.