Adding text on top of an image in Microsoft Word 2016

Hey there, Word lovers. In this tutorial we're going to make text over the top of an image. This one's going to be movable, the image is going to be in the background, it's not going to be washed out, we're going to do this gray box, kind of washed out boxes, well it's part of it. So let's go and do that now in Microsoft Word.

First of all, there's a couple of ways of putting in an image that text can go over the top. The first way, and the quickest way is the watermark; I don't like it, but let's check it out. Let's go to 'Layout', actually go to 'Design', and all the way down in here, there's one called 'Watermark', I'm going to pick 'Custom Watermark', I'm going to grab 'Picture Watermark', 'Select Picture', 'Browse' file, and if you're-- if you want to, you can download the exercise files, there'll be a link on this page. We can go to 'Word Exercise Files', '05 Interactive', we’ll use 'Cover Image', click 'Insert', and click 'OK', and it's kind of this washed out background thing here. We can do some adjustments to it. Watch this, I can go back into there, go to 'Custom Watermark', and I can say, actually I want it to be not washed out, click 'OK'. 

It's still washed out but not as much as it was, it's kind of weird. What happens is, what they mean by washed out is, will it be washed out when it prints? At the moment, because I unticked it, when I print it, it's going to look fine, but in Word, it's always going to be washed out, and I really don't like that about it, I like to use, it’s where doc is kind of like, I want to be the in-product, you know what I mean. So, I don't like watermarks, you can go and play with the size and stuff in here but I’m going to remove this watermark and look at the easier way to do it. Well no, the harder way, the better way.

First of all, what I need to do is, I'm going to make a cover page and then put in text in underneath, so what I'd like to do is, insert a page break here, so I've got my other page, you can do it afterwards but it's a little bit hard because there's images all over the top, and it becomes a little bit tough.

I've got my second page, that's where my content's going to go, this first page is going to be my cover page. Couple of things I want to do before I move on is, I just want to change this 'Size' to 'US letter', and I want to change my 'Margins' to something 'Narrow', and I want to go to 'Insert', let's bring in our image. I'm going to bring 'Color Image', it kind of goes in as you imagined it. You can type in front of it afterwards but you can't get on top. To get on top you need to do two things, you need to select your image, go to this option on the top right here, you need to say, 'Behind Text', this thing’s going to end up  behind text, and I'd like it to be in a 'Fixed position' in this case, because what I want to do is grab the edges here, and make it nice and big, you see, it kind of crops itself off the edge of the page, which is cool. And that's what I want, kind of like a big giant background image.

Now I want to put a text box over the top. Before I do that I'm going to quickly - I promise - put in 'Insert', I'm going to put in 'Shape', I'm going to put in a 'rectangle'. You might have noticed in the last one, there was a big kind of rectangle in the background, that's what I want to do here as well, so I'm going to click, hold, and drag, and I'm going to drag it off this edge, here as well, and I'm going to fill it with black, and I would like to lower the opacity of it, so what you can do, under 'Shape Fill', you can go down to 'More Fill Colors', and where it says 'Transparency' here, I'm going to turn it down to '55'. Actually, if I click off, you'll see there's a line around the outside I want to get rid of, so with it selected, go to 'Format', 'Shape Outlines', 'No Outlines'. Great! 

Now I'm going to put in text over the top. So, to do that, let's go to 'Insert', and there's something called a 'Text Box'. You can actually, up here, my cursor, I can start typing over this text, so that's all you want, you just want an image and you just want to start typing over the background straight away, that's what you'll need. What I'm going to do is, I would like to put in a 'Text Box', there's some pre-made ones, not a fan of most of these, I just want kind of a plain box, you can do that by clicking 'Draw Text Box'. I'm going to draw something that kind of fits in there. 

I've got some copy that you can use for this exercise, under 'Product Information', in our '05 Interactive' folder. I'm going to grab this junk, copy it, go back to our document, paste it in here. There's a few things I need to do. First of all, I want to get rid of this white background, you might be inclined to go back here, and think, "I'm just going to go for this thing, and this fill," kind of just something weird, not what we want. What I'd like to do is click the edge, and go up to 'Format' and then use it. More of a shape, than it is a fill, like it was back here in the 'Home' tab.

So, under 'Shape Fill', we go to ‘No Fill’, there's a black liner on the outside, I want to go to 'Shape Outline', 'No Outline', I'm going to select all the text, do some basic formatting. You’ve already seen now, if you're following along, you can stop this video, you're done. You've got an image in the background, text over the top, but what I'm going to do now is just some font styling, I'm going to pick a 'Font', pick a 'Size', just to make it look a little nicer. What I might do is select all of these, and get rid of this space between the lines, you can see, this 'Remove Space After Paragraph', tidying up a little bit, select these guys, and I might go just down to 'Line Spacing' of '1'. Nice.

All right, that is how to put text over the top of an image in a couple of different ways. I'll see you in the next video. Stay around, the next video is going to be about adding interactive sort of things, like hyperlinks, videos, and creating interactive PDF type things. Let's go do that.