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The Drawing Toolbar
Before you can add or modify drawing objects, you need to display the Drawing
Toolbar. To do this:
- Right-click on an existing toolbar and choose Drawing, or
- Click on View/Toolbars/Drawing, or
- Choose the Drawing button from the Standard toolbar.
The Drawing toolbar normally appears at the bottom of the screen. This toolbar
will remain displayed for each session of Word on that computer, until you close
the toolbar.
Tips on File Management
- Save your work often—at least every ten minutes—or after inserting
or modifying a graphic. The keyboard shortcut for Save is Ctrl/S.
This helps prevent losing your work if your PC freezes.
- If you have completed adding graphics, and wish to work with text, turn
on Picture Placeholders. This displays a blank area in place of the
graphic. Your document should save faster and be generally more responsive
to mouse and keyboard commands, since extra resources are not needed to continually
redraw the images. This option is found under Tools/Options/View tab.
- If you modify a toolbar, you may be prompted to save Normal.dot when
you exit Word. If you choose No, your toolbar changes will not be saved.
- Documents with drawing objects tend to grow in size. Save often!
- It's also a good idea to close Word when you are taking a break. By closing
the program, you'll force some excess system files out of memory. When you
reopen Word, it will be refreshed.
- Back up important work to floppy disk, network or zip drive, or burn it
to a CD.
- If your document is becoming unresponsive or very slow to save, and is 30
pages long or more, consider splitting it into two or more parts.
Note! If you've used Heading styles in your document, you can take
advantage of the Create Sub Document feature in Outline View to
assist.
- If you cut or copy a graphic, it remains on the Windows Clipboard,
even after you paste it. You may see a message when you exit Word, asking
if you want to retain the image on the clipboard. Unless you want to reuse
the graphic in another application, choose No.
Tips on Layout and Design
- White space is a design element, take advantage of it! Don't overcrowd a
page or slide with content. Leave space between graphics and text, or tables
and text. Modify Space Before or Space After paragraphs. You
find this setting under Format/Paragraph.
- On the subject of white space, don't overdo graphics in a document. Firstly,
it can make your document large and unwieldy. Secondly, it can actually detract
from the text. This especially applies to PowerPoint presentations.
- Be consistent in your use of text, graphics, background, fonts and layout.
Don't use too many different fonts, or too many types of drawing (e.g., mixing
jpgs, clipart and autoshapes may cause problems in your document).
- If you want to experiment without potentially messing up an existing document,
make a copy of it first. Then play with the copy.
- Consider creating a brochure, manual, report, poster or other document type
instead of the usual layout. Your choice will depend on the nature of the
information, but don't be afraid to experiment. Word offers several templates
to assist with design, make use of them. Check out Microsoft's
template gallery on the Internet for more ideas and options.
- Make use of the Undo key. You do not always get the result you expected.
A key to learning about graphics and other special effects is to experiment.
In future articles, we'll have some fun playing around with ways of adding
lines, shapes, clipart and WordArt to your documents. I'll also be showing you
ways to modify your clipart.
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