Adding a colored column or text box in Microsoft Word 2016

Course contents
SECTION: 5
How to create a company template 2:20
SECTION: 8
How to make an interactive form 10:13
SECTION: 9
Creating personalized letters using Mail merge 4:34
SECTION: 11
Cheat sheet & shortcuts 3:23

Questions

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Course info

52 lessons / 3 hours

Overview

Hi there, in this Word tutorial course we’re going to learn Microsoft Word together. This is a project based course.

We’ll work through real world documents such as a formal business letter, monthly newsletter, a really long business report, a timetable and a visually exciting interactive PDF product document.

Projects included:

  • Creating a formal business letter

  • Creating a monthly company newsletter

  • Formatting a long business report, adding charts & graphs from Excel

  • Creating a timetable schedule using tables

  • Creating a company template using corporate fonts, colours & images

  • Creating a product overview PDF with basic interactivity

  • Creating a business form

  • Printing personalised letterheads & envelopes for client lists

This course is for beginners. You don’t need any previous knowledge of Word or any desktop publishing experience. We will start right at the basics but quickly get into working with up to date modern features.

You’ll work with images, logos & specific company colours. You’ll create corporate templates and reusable styles - automatically personalizing them using Mail Merge.

You’ll learn to make a monthly newsletter with links & videos ready for sharing & commenting. You’ll learn how to take charge of long documents; cleaning them up and adding professional graphs, infographics, tables and much more including exercise files. We will give you a printable 'cheat sheet'.

I will be around to help.If you get lost you can drop a comment on the video 'Questions and Answers' section that is below every video & I'll be sure to get back to you.

So my friend, now is your time to go from Word Zero, to Word Hero and for you to become the Microsoft Word professional in your office.


What are the requirements?

  • This course is for absolute beginners

  • You'll need a copy of Microsoft Word 2016.

  • No previous Word or desktop publishing skills are necessary.

What am I going to learn from this course?

  • How to work with your specific company fonts & colours.

  • Format text like a professional.

  • Work with various images, styles and implementations.

  • Save documents to older versions of Word.

  • How to save as a PDF.

  • How to make an interactive form.

  • Where to get inspiration for your design.

  • How to install new fonts.

  • Work with multiple column layouts.

  • How to personalise letters & envelopes from a list.

  • Adjust heading styles.

  • Work with really long text documents.

  • How to create a table of contents automatically.

  • How to work with bullets & numbering.

  • How to master tabs.

  • Create beautiful graphics & diagrams.

  • How to make an infographic.

  • How to work closely with Microsoft Excel.

  • How to work with comments & changes.

  • How to share you documents with others.

  • How to build your own company templates.

  • How to work with tables.

  • How to add videos to you documents.

  • You’ll get a cheat sheet, shortcuts and much, much more…

Who is the target audience?

  • Yes: This course is for people who need to learn Microsoft Word for work.

  • Yes: This course is perfect for people who need to upgrade their skills for their CV and job applications.

  • Yes: This course is for complete beginners and for people who know the basics of Word already.

  • No: This course is NOT for people who have advanced knowledge of Microsoft Word.

  • No:This is for PC version of Word 2016. (While 90% of this course will work on a Mac and in early versions of Word no guarantees can be made.)

Course duration 3 hours 18 mins

 

Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

instructor

I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.

Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.

Downloads & Exercise files

Download Exercise Files Download Completed Files

Transcript

Hello, lovely people, in this tutorial we're going to look at making this red box column thing that sits over here, with a bunch of text, width fill. Let's go and make this, it's called a text box.

So first thing we need to do is, we need to be conscious of where we have our cursor flashing, because it's where it's going to kind of be anchored to. It doesn't really matter, I'm going to put mine at the beginning of my title, and we'll look at it in a bit more detail afterwards.

So, cursor's there, I'm going to go to 'Insert', you might be at 'Home', go to 'Insert', and then we're going to find one called 'Text Box', there he is there. Couple of other options, but we're going to put in this simple text box, and it kind of goes in line, which is a bit weird, it kind of goes in and just kind of gets all jammed in there.

Next thing we need to do, oops, 'undo'ed too much. Here he is there. What we're going to do is, with him selected, there’s this little flag option here, it's called 'Layout Options'. You got to click the edge, click on this, and then we're going to use this one that says 'Text Behind'. It just means it's kind of detached from the flow of text, and I can move him around. Now I can grab this edge, go upto here, and kind of align him up with this, drag him down so it fits in there. I'm going maybe move him just a tiny bit. Lovely.

You can use your arrow keys. Can you see, on my keyboard, well you can't see, but tap, tap on my keyboard. We need to do a couple of things now. I want to remove the border, and give it a big background color and play with this padding, so let's do that now.

So the first thing we need to do is, with this selected, grab the edge of it. You might be still on 'Home'. Can you see this little option that says 'Format'? That thing there only appears when you have the text box selected, watch this, it disappears. So grab the edge. It's contextual, it means that it's optional on what I've got selected. You can see a bunch of different stuff there, some presets, colored presets. There's some text styles, terrible. I'm 'undo'ing. So what I want to do though is, 'Shape Fill', I want to pick my corporate color, if you haven't-- you can pick any color here, you can add more colors, pick them from here, or type them in if you know the RGB value, but I've got ones-- I've set the defaults to that red. Where it says 'Outline', I'm going to go to 'No Outline', so there's no line around the outside.

Next thing I want to do is I want to push the padding away, it's a bit too close to the edge here, so with it selected, I'll grab the outside of it, and go up to here where it says 'Shape Styles'. There's all sorts of shape styles, but, can you see this little flag, these are really important. They don't look very exciting, but these little things-- showing you some information, if you pop that out it gives you a lot more, and in our case we want to play around with this last one here which says 'Layout and Properties'. We're going to go to 'Text Box', and there's our margins. You can just keep adjusting these depending on what you want to do.

Now, I've pretty much written mine out, so I know what I want to do. The problem is, I've written them down in points because I was designing this stuff on a different computer. Now, let's say that you’ve got them-- at the moment my computer is set to inches, great. If you have got millimeters though, or in my case I've used points. You can go in here and just select them, and actually just type in points, and it will convert them for you. It's a cool little extra feature. 

So, I wanted '24', you can see inches are going to be too big, but if I put 'pt' afterwards, you can see, it's converted it, and if I 'tab' down to the next one, it's '.33 inches'. Nice. So you can type in anything. If I want '5mm', it will convert it for me as well. The left and the right are going to be the same, so I know it's '0.33', and the top, I can't remember what was mine, add '40' for the top, 'pt', and the bottom I'll do '40' as well. '40 pt'. Great little conversion.

Any text box that you see anywhere in Word, over here you can type these in and it will convert it for you without having to do anything. So that's how to adjust the padding. We've done the color, let's do the fonts that go inside this thing now.

So what I'm going to use is--  I'm going to grab this bit here, these little bits of text I'm going to use, I'm going to cut them out, so 'Edit', 'Cut', and then there's an option up here-- sorry, not 'Edit', 'Cut', it's just click this 'Cut' button, or 'Control X'. I select this text, delete it, paste this in here. 

Now I'm going to do some basic formatting, just select all the text, I'm going to go and pick you, 'Arial', it's going to be '10' point, no, it's going to be bigger, it's going to be '14'. Calm down, Dan. And it's going to be 'Bold', and it's going to be 'white'. And what I want to do is, put a 'return' in, I'm going to grab page 2, and say-- actually, I'm going to put in '10'. I'd like all you guys to be 'white'.

What I'd like to do as well is, I'd like to remove this spacing between the two, it's called space after, so with this selected here I can go to my little drop down, and go to 'Remove Space After', so it kind of jams up next to it, and what I'd like to do is, maybe this line underneath, bit of a horizontal rule, so I'm going to put a 'return', because there's a gap between the two, and I want to put a horizontal rule. To put a horizontal ruler in, that goes to the edge, it's under this border, so under 'Home', there's little icon, and there's a bunch of different stuff. The one you want is 'Horizontal Line'. 

By default-- I don't know why Word-- Word likes to put a drop shadow underneath it, it takes the font color, so it's white, but if I double click it I can get into some adjustments for it, and I definitely don't want to have the shady background, and I want to use this solid color, which is great, and you can play around with how tall it is, how thick the line is, a bunch of different stuff. I'm going to click 'OK', that's what I want. 

Now, in terms of the color, I got to double click it again, and there's the color, white. Nice. I said it takes the font color. That's that guy. I'm going to put in-- I've got the line, what I might do for this one as well, there's this space after between the line and after page 2, so with this selected, I go to this, and I'm going to say 'Remove Space After'. 

The next bit's going to be just repeating. It could be a little boring, so if you want to skip to the end and skip to the next tutorial, go and do that. If you want to follow me along, I'm going to put in some 'return's after these pages, and I'm going to grab this horizontal row, select it, copy it, paste it underneath these, underneath you, underneath you... and I want to match the size and the space before all these things. So, couple of things we need to do. We'll look at the Format Painter, we're going to look at it in a bit more detail later on, but basically it's this. Select the text you’d like, hit 'Format Painter', paint it on the things to change them. Can’t be selected… here we go. Same with this, that's what I like, with the space after gone. Does the Format Painter pick it up? It does. You, you, you...

We could set up styles, and we’re going to look at styles in a little bit, so you probably be-- probably differently, you definitely want to do that, especially-- this is not too long, there's not too many things going on, so with the style we have for, it will probably take you just as long as we just did. 

One of the things we're going to do is, there's a nice big gap at the top, but this guy here at the top is quite jammed in, so I want the space in here, so you could totally just do a return. Nobody's going to find you after I do, if you're not doing it properly, but the proper way is, we’ve done space after, we can do space before as well. So, with your cursor anywhere in this heading here, I can say-- this one here, go to 'Line Spacing', this one called 'Space Before'. How much do I want? Maybe '20 pt' I think, yes, gives a nice space there, so what I can do now is use my Format Painter. I should have totally done this before I put this space before and before I did the first bit of content Format Painter.

Now, cool little shortcut is, we can do 'Control Shift C'. 'Control Shift C' will kind of copy the format, and then I can select this and go 'Control Shift V'. Highlight you,    'Control Shift V'.

All right, so that's formatting of this red box on the side here, it's a text box, can be moved. We've got some padding going on, we've looked at format painting a little bit, space before, and horizontal rule. Let's get on to our next video. 

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