Adding a colored column or text box in Microsoft Word 2016

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.