Key Points

Quick Styles are a great way to apply combinations of formatting to give your documents a professional look.
You can format characters with an almost limitless number of combinations of font, size , style, and effectbut for best results, resist the temptation to use more than a handful of combinations.
You can change the look of paragraphs by varying their indentation, spacing, and alignment and by setting tab stops. Use these formatting options judiciously to create documents with a balanced, uncluttered look.
Bulleted and numbered lists are a great way to present information in an easy to read, easy to understand format. If the built-in bulleted and numbered list styles don't provide what you need, you can define your own styles.

4. Changing the Look of a Document

Chapter at a Glance

In this chapter, you will learn to:
	Change a document's background.
	Change a document's theme.
	Work with templates.
	Add headers and footers.
	Control what appears on each page.

Microsoft Office Word 2007 comes with formatting tools that you can use to ensure the consistent presentation of an entire document. To give a document a polished look, you can specify a background for its pages and a theme for its major elements. You can control the look of a document by basing it on one of the predefined business or personal templates that are installed with Word or that are available for download from the Microsoft Office Online Web site. You can also create your own templates and use them as the basis for new documents.

Word gives you control of the layout of the pages in a document that will be printed. For example, if you want the same information to be repeated on every page, you can set up the information in headers and footers. You can control how the text in the document appears on each page by specifying page and section breaks.

In this chapter, you will apply a background pattern and color , and then you'll add a text watermark. You'll apply a theme to an existing document, change the colors and the fonts, and save a custom theme. You will use a predefined Word template to create a document, modify the document, and then save it as a new template. You will also create a custom template. Finally, you will add headers and footers to a document, and you'll learn how to use page and section breaks to keep information together in logical units.

Changing a Document's Background

Whether you are creating a document that will be printed, viewed on a computer, or published on the Internet and viewed in a Web browser, you can make your document stand out by adding a background color or pattern.

See Also

For information about creating documents for the Web, see "Creating and Modifying a Web Document" in Chapter 11, "Creating Documents for Use Outside of Word."

There might be times when you want words or a graphic to appear behind the text of a printed or online document. For example, you might want the word CONFIDENTIAL to appear faintly behind the text in a contract, or you might want a graphic to appear faintly behind the text in a press release. These faint background images are called watermarks . Watermarks are visible in a document, but because they are faint, they don't interfere with the readers' ability to view the document's main text.

Background colors, patterns, and watermarks are applied by clicking buttons in the Page Background group on the Page Layout tab.

In this exercise, you will apply a background color and pattern, and then you'll add a text watermark.

USE the 01_Background document. This practice file is located in the Chapter04 subfolder under SBS_Word2007 .

BE SURE TO start Word before beginning this exercise.

OPEN the 01_Background document.

1.	On the Page Layout tab, in the Page Background group, click the Page Color button, and then under Theme Colors , click the second lightest green box ( Olive Green, Accent 3, Lighter 60% ). The background of the document changes to the selected color.
2.	In the Page Background group, click the Page Color button, and then click Fill Effects . The Fill Effects dialog box opens.
3.	Click the Texture tab.
4.	Click the effect in the second column of the first row, and then click OK . The background changes to display the effect rather than the color.
5.	On the Page Layout tab, in the Page Background group, click the Watermark button. The Watermark gallery opens.
6.	Scroll to the bottom of the gallery, noticing the available options. Clicking any of these options will insert the specified watermark in pale blue on every page of the current document.
7.	Below the gallery, click Custom Watermark . The Printed Watermark dialog box opens. Notice that you can insert a picture or text as a watermark.
8.	Select the Text watermark option, click the Text arrow, scroll down the list, and then click URGENT .
9.	Click the Color arrow, and under Theme Colors , click the white box.
10.	With the Semitransparent check box and Diagonal option selected, click OK . The specified text is inserted diagonally across the page.
11.	At the right end of the status bar, click the Zoom button. Then in the Zoom dialog box, click Whole Page , and click OK . Zoom The document displays the texture and watermark you specified.

CLOSE the 01_Background document without saving your changes.

Using a Picture as a Watermark

When you want to dress up the pages of your document without distracting attention from the main text, you might consider adding a graphic watermark.

Here's how to add a graphic watermark to every page of a document:

1.	On the Page Layout tab, in the Page Background group, click the Watermark button, and then click Custom Watermark .
2.	In the Printed Watermark dialog box, select the Picture watermark option, and then click Select Picture .
3.	In the Insert Picture dialog box, navigate to the folder where the picture you want to use is stored, and double-click the name of the picture.
4.	Click the Scale arrow, and choose how big or small you want the watermark picture to appear in the document.
5.	For a more vibrant picture, clear the Washout check box.
6.	Click OK . The picture is inserted as a watermark at the size you specified.