How can I quickly design and print event tickets for my theatre group?

June 4, 2008 4:20 PM

My community theatre group forgot to have tickets printed for this weekend's show. I'd like to use a template and print them on my office copier to help the group save money. Is there an online program that will help me do this easily? I have MS Office 2000 programs, but the built in templates don't want to cooperate. Guidance would be appreciated.
posted by rdauphin to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Why do you need to print tickets? At the theater I work at, we often just use rolls of pre-printed tickets like this. Alternately, you can use a program as a ticket.
posted by minervous at 4:48 PM on June 4, 2008

I've not used this program, so I can't speak to the quality of the free demo (also, its usage is exclusive to PCs - not mac compatible), but TicketCreator appears to do exactly what you're asking for.

There are also these additional MS Office Ticket templates available (here are a few more).
posted by numinous at 5:05 PM on June 4, 2008

Great idea, minervous. I'll certainly take this idea to the group. In case it doesn't fly, anyone know easy software to use?

I forgot to mention they could be very simple, general admission tickets...so one size fits all.
posted by rdauphin at 5:17 PM on June 4, 2008

Yay theater! I run one of these, too. For my two cents - if you print up individualized tickets, you will want them to be on cardstock ($) because it's less floppy. Then, you will have to cut them out - unless you buy some kind of perforated paper (also $) or have them printed at the copy shop and have them cut the tickets. None of that sounds ideal to me. However, if I were doing it - I would design one ticket in photo shop or I guess even in word or paint or something (I've been at it w/ photo shop for so long that I don't really think of other programs to do stuff like that, even if photoshop is not the best choice) and then drop that on the page ever how many times it will fit. Print that off a bunch and you have your tickets, just be sure to put in a border so that there is something to cut around.

But -- if it were my show, I would buy the tear-apart tickets that minervous pointed out and spend my time/$$/resources on printing nicer programs. That may or may not be a trade off for you, though.

Break a leg!
posted by Medieval Maven at 6:03 PM on June 4, 2008

On re-read - when I say "individualized" I mean, for your company, not for the particular patrons. Carry on.
posted by Medieval Maven at 6:46 PM on June 4, 2008

In my concert band, we always use perforated sheets of business cards for our tickets. You can buy them in bulk at Staples (and probably elsewhere), and download a template to edit them in a word processing program.
posted by LolaGeek at 5:06 AM on June 5, 2008

I would do what LolaGeek suggests, and you probably won't even have to download anything. Word has templates built in for many many labels and business card sheets. You're looking to create "labels", even though what you print on will not be actual labels.
posted by SuperSquirrel at 9:40 AM on June 5, 2008

I agree with LolaGeek and SuperSquirrel - using the label template will be easiest for you (probably) and then you can just print directly on paper and cut them apart yourself.

If you need to have serialized tickets, there are easy ways to do that also. I have done this in the past (so that you can track who purchased which tickets, which were used, etc.) fairly simply in Word. Publisher is better for laying out graphics and making it look snappy, but it doesn't allow you to serialize the numbers, so it's a bigger hassle.

The fastest way that I can think of (off the top of my head) to serialize tickets (and/or personalize them) is to create a spreadsheet in Excel with the ticket numbers in a column (and names in another, if you're interested in that). Then use mail-merge onto a label template (which you can set up in advance with the other admission info: show time, name, etc.). What you'll end up with is unique numbers on each ticket.

I hope this makes sense. If you need a hand, feel free to contact me directly. Email address is my user name at gmail.com. :)
posted by giddygirlie at 1:43 PM on June 6, 2008