Chapter 18: Drawing Attention to Documents by Using Borders and Shading

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Overview

Sometimes producing a simple document on a clean white page is the best approach for communicating a message as clearly as possible. But other times, you might want to impress your audience with a little pizzazz by enhancing a document's look, sparking up the design, and showing readers you really know what you're doing. One approach you can use to present more than simple text-on-paper is to use borders and shading to create effective, eye-catching document designs.

A few ways you can use borders and shading include:

• Creating a border around a table

• Setting a heading as white text in a dark box

• Showcasing a special section of text that accompanies an article

• Setting off a table of contents so readers can read it easily

• Offsetting areas of Web pages with shading

Of course, you'll probably come up with numerous other ways to use borders and shading after you master the basics of Word 2003.

Tip 

Make custom border choices  Keep in mind that the borders you create don't have to go all the way around an item or page. You can apply borders to only the top or bottom, or sides, of an object as described in "Creating Partial Borders".

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