How to put text around the edge of a circle - type on a path Word 2016
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Overview
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
instructorI 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.
Hello there, wonderful Word people, we're going to look at doing this, where it's type on a path or that 'Benjamin Franklin' there, it's going to wrap around the outside of this circle. So let's go and look at how to do that in Word.
First thing I want to do is create a text box, so we're going to need to be under 'Insert', and this kind of changes depending on where you are. If you have your cursor flashing inside of a shape, and you go to 'Text Box', you get kind of one option, if you're in your regular body copy here, you go to 'Text Box', it shows all these options. Doesn’t really matter. You want to go to this one that says 'Draw Text Box'. Where are we going to draw it? Anywhere. And, what I'd like to do is, instead of being any oval shape I want it to be a perfect square. It's going to help us to make it into a perfect circle. Weird, huh?
Hold 'Shift' while you're dragging, so click and hold before you let go of the mouse - Hold 'Shift', can you see, perfect square. We're going to resize this afterwards. So I've got my text box, and what I'd like to do is, I'd like to do a couple of things. I want to double check in here that it's set to 'Behind Text', and it's in a 'Fixed' position. We can move it, and doesn't flow along with the text. That's phase one. Let's start getting names there. With the text selected, I want to do a couple of things, I probably want to do-- I want to go 'Home', I want to do it so it's 'Italics', and I want to match the 'Times New Roman' that I was using, and size wise, I'm probably going to bump it down to something quite small. Maybe not this one. '10'. I want the text to be white. I won't make it white just yet because if I lose it I won't be able to see it.
So, I need to turn it into a circle, and that's the important bit here. So, grab the edge of your text box, go along to 'Format', and in here we're going to go to the one that says 'Text Effects'. Click on this one, we're going to go down to 'Transform', and we're going to use one of these ones. You can kind of see it on the edge there. It depends on which one you need, so have a flick around. I want mine kind of that sort of shape, and what I want to do is, I want to-- you see this big rotation here? I'm going to rotate it around so it sits in the corner here. I'm grabbing the edges, I want it to be roughly about there. Is my square big enough? You might have to make it bigger or smaller. Remember, holding 'Shift' while you're dragging it will make it perfect. That's about right for me.
Now I want to remove the white background. To do that, first, with it selected, go to 'Shape Fill', then go to 'No Fill'. Let's go to 'Shape Outline', then go to 'No Outline', and then go to 'Text Fill', then go to 'White', and there's 'Benjamin Franklin'. Kind of cool out there. You might want to make it a little bit bigger, holding 'Shift'. You can use keyboard to tap it around. That is how you get something to look like it’s typed in above to match a circle, you could get it to match a square, a star, any shape, you can build, under 'Insert', 'Shapes'. The text will follow any of these lines or these patterns.
Couple of things before I go is that, weirdly, if you try and amend this text - I want to double click 'Benjamin Franklin' - you'll notice that he ends up at the top left, and you're like, "Ah, it's broken." It's just while you're editing it. It's really hard because it’s white text. So you might have to kind of make it red for a second, change the name. Watch this, when I click out, it goes back to where it was. It's gone back to the wrong color as well, so I'm going to 'undo'. That's just something that happens while you're working on it. Click it once, goes up there, click back off, back there it goes.
The other thing is that I want to edit this text underneath, the 'Tell me', but I keep getting Benjamin; what you have to do is, drag him off, and then start working on this one.
One last thing before we go-- if I click on this, you can see, this is the anchor, it doesn't really matter because, watch this, I can move this around, and the text stays where he is, but if I delete him, that's a different story. If I click on him I know that the anchor's there, but if I grab all of that, and delete, you can see, even though I'm not selecting this, I'm just selecting this bit over here. Can you see, because the anchor kind of gets all tied up in there he can go and get deleted. You might be working on a document, and then one day, you look at it, and you're like, "Where the heck did my pull quote go?" It's because, unfortunately the anchor needs to be somewhere, so if you kind of put it somewhere, and I've maybe put it there, doesn’t really matter where you put it, because the text doesn't change. There's somewhat you're unlikely to select and delete. That will happen, happens to me, happens to all of us.
All right, let's get on to the next tutorial.