Section 10.1. Drop Caps, Text Boxes, and WordArt


10.1. Drop Caps, Text Boxes, and WordArt

Drop caps, text boxes, and WordArt let you turn text into a design element. Although these elements lose their impact if you overdo them, putting a little pizzazz in your text can direct your audience's attention to important information. For example, you can use a text box to create a pull quote that highlights your company's stellar performance.

Drop caps, text boxes, and WordArt take color, font, and design cues from the theme you've selected for your document. When you see color choices, the theme colors are usually presented at the top of the menu. Later, if you decide to change the theme for your document, the accent colors and font styles in your graphics change to match.

UP TO SPEED
In Graphic Terms

People use the word graphic to mean any kind of visual representation or illustration, whether they're thinking of a photograph, a line drawing, a chart, or what-have-you. Word works with several types of graphics, each of which looks and acts a little differently in your document. Here's a guide to what all these graphic terms mean:

  • Pictures . With the Insert Picture command, you can find photos and drawings you've created or saved on your computer and place them in a Word document. As long as it's in a computer graphic file formatlike .jpg, .tif, or .emfWord thinks of it as a picture. You insert pictures, along with the following four items, from the Insert Illustrations group .

  • Clip art . Word comes with a huge library of photos and pictures that you can add to your documents for free. Also, although they're not technically clip art, you can find media files like movies, music, and other sounds in the Clip Art task pane. Some of these files are on your computer and others are in libraries on the Internet. The task pane lets you search for just the right image, video, or audio out of the thousands available. (Obviously, you'll use the video and audio files in documents destined for the Web or email rather than print.)

  • SmartArt . Part graphic and part text, SmartArt is a new type of graphic introduced in Word 2007. All you have to do is type text into a box and SmartArt handles all the formatting and placement chores, creating a great looking graphic image. When you make changes to the words, SmartArt is smart enough to make everything fit.

  • Shapes . Word includes a library of simple shapes, lines, arrows, and common icons. They're easy to size , position, and format. You can use them to create your own charts and illustrations.

  • Chart . Charts are different from other images in that data is behind the graphic. Charts take numbers and translate them into lines, bars, or pie charts. You tell Word what kind of a chart to create, and then you provide the labels and numbers .

  • Drop caps, text boxes, and WordArt (Insert Text) . These graphic elements are a little different from the other items in this list because theyre character-based, but when it comes to sizing and positioning them, they behave much like photos and drawings.



Note: To work with pictures, drawings, and SmartArt, you need to be in Print Layout or Web Layout view. In Draft or Outline view, your graphics appear as placeholder boxes. In these views, you can position the placeholder boxes, but you can't modify the graphics. (If you don't see a placeholder box in your document, just click the empty space where the graphic should be. You then see a box that you can drag to a new location.)

10.1.1. Adding a Drop Cap to a Paragraph

Drop caps are a decorative feature with a practical purpose. They give a paragraph an added sense of importance as the beginning of a chapter or document. Drop caps attract readers' attention and draw their eyes to the beginning of the text, inviting them to start reading (Figure 10-1). With Word you can easily add a drop cap to any paragraph, and if you're in the mood, you can fiddle around with it to create your own special effect.

Figure 10-1. Word provides two styles of drop caps.
Left: Dropped is the most common style and fits within the body of the paragraph.
Right: The In Margin style places the drop cap by itself in the left margin.


Here are the two simple steps for creating a drop cap:

  1. Click within the paragraph you want to have a drop cap .

    You don't have to select the letter. Word knows that a drop cap is going to be the first letter of the paragraph.

  2. Choose Insert Text Drop Cap, or use the shortcut Alt+N, RC, and then choose from the three styles on the menu .

    The choices available are: None, Dropped, and In Margin. Dropped, as shown at the top of Figure 10-1, is the most familiar style. The In Margin style places the oversized initial in the left margin.

    When you click your choice, the menu disappears. Word changes the initial cap in the paragraph to about three lines tall and positions it according to the option you chose. That's all there is to it.

10.1.1.1. Modifying a drop cap

When you create a drop cap, Word places the initial character in the paragraph in a frame of its own and positions it either in the paragraph or in the margin, but you can do lots of things to modify the design. Word provides a Drop Cap dialog box where you can make some changes (Figure 10-2), but it's just as easy to edit the drop cap right in the document.

Figure 10-2. Using the Drop Cap box, you can choose one of the three styles and adjust the font, size, and position of the initial.


Because the cap is in a frame, you can drag it anywhere you want. To resize the drop cap, simply drag on a corner or side of the frame. Click inside the frame, and then select the letter to format it. Use any of Word's font formats to modify the letter. The color, shadow, emboss, and engrave options are great for drop caps. You can even add letters to the Drop Cap frame, so you can create a drop word, as shown in Figure 10-3.

Figure 10-3. To create a drop word like this, first insert a drop cap, and then type the rest of the word. In this example, each letter was also selected individually and resized using the Home Font Font Size command. Then the drop word was positioned by dragging the frame.


10.1.1.2. Removing a drop cap

Use the same menuInsert Text Drop Capto remove a drop cap from your paragraph. Just select the None option, and the drop cap and the frame disappear. The paragraph goes back to its regular shape, with the initial letter back in line and sized like its compatriots.

10.1.2. Bending Words with WordArt

WordArt is a lot more fun than it is useful. How often do you really need arched headlines in your documents? On top of that, you can waste a lot of time fiddling with all the options to see the cool effects you can produce (Figure 10-4).

Figure 10-4. WordArt is way too much fun to be a serious business tool. You'll waste precious minutes trying out different bending, spacing, and twisting options when you should be working on that quarterly report for the VP.


To transform a word in your document into WordArt, double-click to select the word, and then choose Insert Text WordArt to see the menu of WordArt designs. If you click the one that suits your artistic purposes, you see your word transformed.

10.1.2.1. Modifying WordArt

When you click to select your WordArt creation, the WordArt Tools contextual tab appears on the right side of the ribbon. You can use this tab to make adjustments to 3-D effects (Alt+JW, U) and drop shadows (Alt+CW, V) and specify the text wrapping options (Alt+JW, TW).

In spite of the incredible ways you've transformed your word, it's still text to Microsoft. So if you catch a misspelling or need to make other changes, choose WordArt Tools Format Text Edit Text to open the Edit WordArt Text box, where you can fix things up.



Word 2007 for Starters. The Missing Manual
Word 2007 for Starters: The Missing Manual
ISBN: 0596528302
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 114
Authors: Chris Grover

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net