Your Client Keeps Breaking Their Word Letterhead. Here’s the Permanent Fix
By the WordLetterhead Team · Last updated:
The email arrives every couple of months: “the letterhead broke again.” It isn’t the client’s clumsiness — it’s the file’s architecture. Move the artwork where clicks can’t reach it and the emails stop.
Why does the client’s letterhead keep breaking?
Because the design is reachable. In most hand-built files the artwork sits in the editable layer — the same layer the client types in — so every letter is another round of near-misses: a logo nudged while selecting text, a banner stretched by a stray drag, a footer deleted with a backspace. Eventually one of the near-misses lands, gets saved, and becomes the new normal.
Telling the client to be careful doesn’t change the odds — it just schedules the next email. The file has to make the accident impossible.
What’s the permanent fix?
Rebuild once with the artwork in the header layer. While anyone types in the body, header artwork can’t even be selected — no click, drag, resize, or delete — and the behavior is part of the .docx format itself, so it holds in the client’s copy of Word without any setup on their end.
- Upload the original design — the PDF from your deliverables — to WordLetterhead.
- Drag the typing area where the client’s letters belong.
- Download the .docx and send it with a one-line note: “use this one.”
Two minutes and $9 — less than the time it takes to open their mangled file and find what moved.
Doesn’t rebuilding from their broken file make more sense?
No — patching a broken file keeps its broken architecture. The artwork is still in the reachable layer, so you’d be signing up for the same email in two months. Rebuild from the clean original design instead, and put the letterhead somewhere the client’s everyday editing can’t touch. What a complete, break-proof delivery looks like is in the handoff checklist; if the client is mid-rebrand, the surfaces that get missed are in the rebrand checklist.
Common questions
- Will the locked file work in the client’s older Word?
- Yes — the lock is core .docx header behavior, supported in Word 2016 and newer on Windows and Mac. It isn’t a plug-in or a protection setting that can be switched off by accident; it’s how the format treats header content while the body is being edited.
- The client legitimately needs the design changed. Then what?
- That’s a design revision, not a breakage — update the artwork in your design tool, then rebuild the Word file from the new export. Two minutes and $9 per revision keeps the client typing on current branding.
- Should I charge the client for the rebuild?
- Most designers fold it into the relationship — it costs $9 and two minutes, and it permanently ends a recurring support burden. If you bill it, bill the outcome: “locked letterhead the office can’t break” is a deliverable clients happily pay for.
- Can I verify the fix before sending it to the client?
- Yes — the watermarked sample is free and behaves exactly like the paid file. Open it, try to click the artwork while typing, print a page. Buy the $9 clean file once it survives your own attempts to break it.