Adding Text to Drawings

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A picture may be worth a thousand words, but you'll often find that you want to add text to your drawings. You can add text as a separate element by drawing a text box, or you can enter text directly into an existing object. For example, you might want to insert text into a star shape or a banner. To add text to drawings, use one of the following methods:

• Add text box properties to an existing shape. To enter text directly into an object, right-click the object, and choose Add Text on the shortcut menu. The shape will become a text box, with an insertion point inside. You simply type and format the text you want to appear in the shape.
• Create a text box. To create a freestanding text box, click the Text Box button on the Drawing toolbar, and draw a text box on the drawing canvas. After you draw a text box, you simply type text into the box. Text boxes can be treated as shapes, which means that they can be resized and formatted in many of the same ways shapes are formatted, including modifying fills, borders, shadow, and 3-D effects.

In addition to entering text in text boxes and objects, you can add WordArt to your drawings. To add a WordArt object, click the Word Art button on the Drawing toolbar, which opens the WordArt Gallery. WordArt enables you to add highly stylized text to your drawings so that you can create custom text art, such as title bars, logos, and buttons.

For more information about working with text boxes, see Chapter 23, "Using Word's Desktop Publishing Features," and for more information about WordArt, see Chapter 17, "Customizing Documents with WordArt."

Inside Out

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As mentioned, when you create a freehand drawing, you can't right-click the drawing and choose Add Text. To work around this limitation, you can click the Text Box button on the Drawing toolbar and draw a text box on top of your freehand drawing. Then type and format text in the text box. If you want to ensure that the text and drawing aren't separated or layered incorrectly in the future, choose the shape and the text box (by pressing Shift as you click the objects), and then click the Draw button on the Drawing toolbar and choose Group on the drop-down menu to group the two objects together.

Tip - Create Web page buttons

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By combining basic objects and text boxes, you can create custom buttons for Web pages. To make these custom buttons active hyperlinks, you simply add hyperlink properties to your drawing objects, as described in Chapter 31, "Creating Professional Web Sites."