Wrapped With Style
Do you use a lot of pictures in your MS Word documents?
Hate the way they push the text around the document, often causing awkward looking gaps and layout problems?
How would you like a way to get the text and picture to “play together nicely”? You know, make them work in a way that doesn’t cause all the gaps and other problems.
Maybe even turn this
Into this?
Sound good? (Yes, I would whole-heartedly agree that it does!)
What we’re looking for is called text wrapping. (Makes sense given that we need to wrap the text around the picture.)
There’s a couple of ways to find the text wrapping settings – one of them is on the Picture Toolbar that opens when a picture is selected.
You’re looking for the Text Wrapping button. The little dog represents a picture and the lines represent text so you can tell by looking at the button how the relationship between the two is currently set.
If you click the button then a whole list of choices will appear.
Choose from the list how you want the text to interact with the picture (the names are pretty self-explanatory). I tend to choose either Tight (which has the text follow the contours of the picture as shown above) or Square (which will force the text into a square shape at the edges of the picture).
But, whatever your choice you should see a change in the way the text behaves around the picture. Hopefully your choice makes an improvement but if it doesn’t then select a different option.
Now, on to the second way to cause text wrapping changes…
Should you, for some reason, not have the picture toolbar handy or not like it at all then you could choose to right click on the picture and choose Format Picture from the menu that pops open.
When the Picture Format window opens you’re looking for the tab that contains the wrapping choices. In the newer versions it’s on the Layout tab and in the older versions you may find a Wrapping Tab.
Either way, when you get there you’re presented with pretty much the same choices. Make your selection and click OK.
Once again, you’re back in your document where you should find that the text and picture have begun a very pleasant relationship giving you that professional look you were seeking.
~ April