From the course: The Best of Word Tips Weekly

Create visual interest with icons

From the course: The Best of Word Tips Weekly

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Create visual interest with icons

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- [Instructor] Adding graphical images to your Word documents can really make them more visually interesting, and there are a number of different types of graphics we can bring in. If you want a simple icon, you don't have to create your own. There are a number of icons to choose from built right into Word, and we're going to explore them in this week's Word tip. You can follow along with me if you have the exercise files, opening up LH_ExecTeam097, or work with any of your own documents. Let's click after the title here. Maybe that's where we want our icon to appear. We're looking at the beginnings of our executive team here. Maybe an icon representing an org chart would be cool. We'll go to the Insert tab, and it's from here where we find in the Illustrations group the Icons button. Give it a click. This'll open up another dialog. You can see a huge number of categories down the left-hand side here. We can go directly to those categories by selecting them. Look at all the different icons to choose from. You can also use the scroll bar to scroll through them all here. Let's go directly to the Business category. So, we'll scroll up the alphabetical list, click Business, and sure enough, there's an org chart icon here. Let's give it a click. Notice it only gets checked off. It's not actually ready to be inserted until we click Insert down below, but we can go in and select multiples if we wanted to, and insert them all at once. We only want the one so deselecting, we click again, any of the icons we've already selected, to deselect them. So with just our org chart selected, we'll click the Insert button, and it goes in line with the text right where our cursor was flashing after our title. Notice also that something appears at the top here, Graphics Tools, and Format is selected. So, we can do some things that we can do with most other graphical objects like change the positioning and how text wraps around our object. Let's go to the position. You can see In Line with Text is at the top, and all that means is it's being treated like any other character. If we start adding to our title, it moves around with the other characters in our title. Let's say we want it in the top right corner though. Clicking this changes it so it's no longer in line with text. We can actually move it around a little bit, even go above our margin if we wanted to. We can also use the handles to resize it. Let's make it a little bit bigger. And with Format still selected, there are some graphic styles to choose from. It's a limited list, not what we're used to seeing, for example, when working with other objects likes shapes, but click the drop-down. You'll see some presets that include outlines with the color white as the fill. As you hover over these, you get a preview right on your page of what that's going to look like. Some have fills and no outline. Some have fills with a dark outline, and some have no fill whatsoever with just an outline. And if you don't see what you're looking for here, just click in the background right on the object. You'll notice there's no option to change the fill yourself or the outline separately unless you convert it to a shape, and we can do that by going over here to the left. Click Convert to Shape, answer Yes to the fact that you're about to convert this to a Microsoft Office drawing object, and it might move around on you because it's anchored differently now. We can still move it back here and do those other things like resizing it, and let's go up to the Drawing Tools now that appears with Format under it. Click Format, and check out the shape styles. Click the drop-down. There's many more presets to choose from, and again, we can hover over these. If we're still not seeing what we're looking for, click in the background on the object. Now we can go in and manipulate the shape and outline separately. So, let's go to the Shape Fill, and let's say we want to fill it with white. Currently, we're not seeing anything because the outline is also white, but let's click the Shape Outline and go for a nice purple that matches our Landon Hotel colors. Give it a click. And of course, we can also use Shape Effects, just like we could, there are a number of effects that were available when it was an icon. Now, it's a shape, and we have these same effects. So, if we wanted to add a shadow to it, for example, just hover over these, and you'll see a nice little preview on the page. It kind of brings it off the page. I'm going to go with Offset Right like so. Now, we can click in the background to see the end result, and that really changes the look and feel of a simple text document. But by adding icons, we can make them more visually interesting here in Microsoft Word.

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