From the course: Word 2013 Essential Training

Illustrating with pictures, shapes, and clip art - Microsoft Word Tutorial

From the course: Word 2013 Essential Training

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Illustrating with pictures, shapes, and clip art

If a picture is truly worth a thousand words, think of all of the typing you can save yourself by inserting pictures into your Word documents. That's what we're going to talk about as we work with our NO media campaign1 document here, which has some text, and room for some images. Let's just click between our two paragraphs here, so your flashing cursor is on the blank line. That would be a good place to insert an image. To do that, we go to the Insert tab, and we have a number of options in the Illustrations section here. Pictures could be photos that you have stored on your computer, or elsewhere. Online pictures, where we could go get clip art, for example, search the Internet, even use your own SkyDrive, or Flickr account if you have one. We can draw our own shapes. We're going to focus on these three to begin with. Let's go to Pictures. Next we'll navigate to the Exercise Files > Chapter9 folder, where we do have a couple. As we hover over them, you can see one is a PNG file, and the other is a JPEG file. We're seeing both types, because down below, All Pictures is selected for what is going to be displayed in this folder. Click the dropdown, and you'll see there is quite a number of formats to choose from when inserting graphics: metafiles, there is JPEG, and PNG, Bitmaps or BMP files as well, you can see GIFF, etcetera. So, lots to choose from. Let's insert one called Surf; that's our JPEG. Select it, click Insert, and it shows up right where our cursor was flashing. Notice it has handles around the outside, so it's selected, meaning we can do things with it, like size it down. Let's go to the bottom right corner, and when you see the double diagonal arrow, we'll just size it down, so it's not so huge. Alright, now we'll click after it, and we're ready to insert another one. So let's go back to the Insert tab, go to Pictures, and select Reflection, our PNG file, and when we click Insert there, you can see it's inserted right after, it too is highlighted or selected by those handles, and we'll size it down to about the same size as our previous one. Let go, deselect by clicking off to the side; we now have two images. Again, our cursor is flashing after our newly inserted image. Let's go back to the Insert tab. This time go to Online Pictures, and look at your options. If you're connected to the Internet, you can go to Office.com, and search for clip art. Just type in a keyword, like bike. When you press Enter, you're going to see a list of Clip Art images available to you for free from Office.com, and when you see one you like, all you do is select it, and click Insert. There we go. Now, if you do have something that you don't want, as long as it's selected, and you see those handles around the outside, you can hit your Delete key on the keyboard to remove it. Let's go back to Insert, go to Online Pictures, and talk about some of the other options you'll see here, like Bing Image Search. When you click in there and type keywords, you'll be searching the Internet, or the Web, for images. If you have a Flickr account, you can be logged in, and access photos you have stored in that account. Same thing for your SkyDrive. Now, if you don't see Flickr there, maybe you've never used it, it is an option that can be enabled, typically in the bottom left corner, if you haven't done so already. So, lots of options, if you're connected, to getting photos or images. When you're done, just click the Close button in the top right-hand corner. The other thing you can do is draw your own. So let's just hit Enter on the keyboard, so we have a blank line. Go back to the Illustrations section of the Insert ribbon, and go to Shapes, and when we click the dropdown, look at all the shapes we have in different categories: Lines, Rectangles, Basic Shapes, Arrows, Flowchart; lots of different options to choose from. All you need to do is select the one you want, I'm going to go to this arrow pointing to the right under Block Arrows, give it a click, and you're ready now to start drawing. So let's just draw from our cursor across, and down, and you can see what's happening; we're getting our shape. It's right on top of our existing content. We can move it around by clicking and dragging it, and then we also have a number of formatting options that are available to us under Drawing Tools that appears when a shape is selected. So we have shape styles, fills, outlines, effects; things we're going to talk about as we move through the movies in this Chapter. For now, we'll just deselect it by clicking anywhere outside. So, when it comes to illustrating your document, those are a few options; inserting images, like photos, grabbing clip art from Office.com, or your own Flickr account, SkyDrive, even searching the Internet, and of course, drawing your own shapes as well.

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