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Chapter 23
When you work in Microsoft Word, you probably take for granted how Word seamlessly flows text from margin to margin and page to page. On occasion, however, you might want to venture beyond basic word processing and into the realm of desktop publishing. For example, instead of filling up a page with text, you might want to precisely position and format blocks of text in your document, or you might want to customize the overall "look" of your document by applying a uniform color scheme. Although Word doesn't offer all the bells and whistles incorporated in high-end desktop publishing applications, it does include a nice collection of desktop publishing tools that can serve the majority of your workaday desktop publishing needs.
Specifically, the desktop publishing capabilities in Word let you control text layout by using text boxes, AutoShapes formatted to serve as text containers, and frames. And you can add pizzazz to your page layouts by including backgrounds and themes in on-screen documents and watermarks in printed documents. In this chapter, you'll learn how to use these common desktop publishing tools to create professional and imaginative document layouts.