Used Quark Xpress professionally for many years and have been very happy with it, but am intrigued about the possibility of a high-powered page layout app at a better price point. I've downloaded the beta of Publisher and have been playing around with it. It looks good but I haven't been able to figure out how to create columns for the entire page - i.e two columns, three columns, etc. I see that I can create columns for text boxes but I want columns in the background of the full page. I may be missing something but if I am, this feature should be a lot easier to access.
