Importing Text into Your Documents

You won't always want to type text directly into a publication. As mentioned earlier in this hour , you'll often create the text in Word and then transfer that text to Publisher. To bring text from other sources, you'll almost always do one of two things:

• Copy text from the Windows Clipboard

• Import the text from its original application's document file

Suppose you write a travel book that teaches people how to travel through Europe the fun way, as a traveler who meets the people and not as a tourist who views the sites from a bus 50 yards away. To help promote your book, you create a newsletter that acts as a sales flier for your book. You might want to copy some text from the book's manuscript into the newsletter. You certainly don't want to copy the entire book, just a paragraph or two.

Start Word (you don't have to exit Publisher to start Word, of course ”just click the Start button and start Word as you normally do). Load the book's document into Word, select the paragraph you want to copy to the newsletter, and select Edit, Copy (Ctrl+C) to copy that paragraph to the Windows Clipboard. Switch to Publisher (press Alt+Tab to switch to Publisher or click the Publisher button on your Windows taskbar), click the area that is to receive your text, and select Edit, Paste (Ctrl+V) to put the Clipboard's text into your publication.

Some people find that they can paste text (and perform other text- related operations) more easily by right-clicking over the area to receive the text and selecting Paste to paste the text at the cursor's location.

Although the Clipboard is useful for copying small portions of text into your publication, you might want to import long columns of text into Publisher from a full Word document. If you work with others who write for the publications you produce, you will be able to lay out an initial publication and then import the other writers' document files directly into the newsletter columns.

To import a file from Word, select Insert, Text File from the menu to display the Insert Text File dialog box. Select the document from whatever folder contains that text document, and Publisher then imports that file directly into your publication. You can format the text, such as adding a drop cap and making other font and character spacing changes if you want.

Don't import a file over a column's title. Type all titles so you can be sure that the title fits within the area you've designated for the title. Import only into the body of a column of text.