Adding text on top of an image in Microsoft Word 2016

This lesson is exclusive to members

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

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

Transcript

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. 

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