Inserting and formatting a text box

A Text Box is similar to a graphic element with Text Wrap enabled in that it sits in its own layer in the Word document and text wraps around it. Text boxes are often used to call up bits of text in the document. You'll see them used in magazines and newspapers as well as in corporate communications. What I have here is a document laid out with a two-column section in the middle. I explained how to set up multiple column text in the Page and Section Formatting chapter. What I want to do here is put a text box in the middle of the page and repeats some of the document text in it for emphasis.

Although you can do this with single column text, I think it works best when you set the text box between two columns. Now in the Home Ribbon, you want to click the text box button, which is this one here. The mouse pointer turns into a text box pointer. What we want to do is drag a box about 2 inches wide in the middle of the document. As you drag, you'll see some measurements up here. When you have got about 2 inches of width release the mouse button. Now if you don't get the text box exactly in the middle, don't worry about it.

I will show you how to move it later on. An insertion point should appear inside the text box. If it doesn't you can click inside the text box to place it there. You can then type in any text you like/ But instead of typing, we want to copy and paste some text into the box. In the document, we are going to select from where it says 5% of our sales. That's right over here, to the end of the paragraph. So just select all that until the end of the paragraphs. Now, we want to copy that text, so we will press Command+C, that will put in the clipboard, then we click inside the text box, make sure the insertion point is blinking in there.

There it is and then I'll press Command+V to paste it in there and there's the text. Now let's format that text. We want a bigger font in italics with bigger line spacing. We also want it centered in the box, and we can make all those changes on the Home Ribbon. So let's start off by selecting that text and making the changes here. We'll make it a 16-point font, we will also make italic and we will also change the line spacing to 1.5 and finally we will make it Centered.

Now we can resize the text box by dragging one of its selection handles. As you can see the box isn't quite big enough the way I drew it, so I can just drag this down and that will I'll resize the box. You want the text box to be relatively snug around the text. You can move the box into position on the page by dragging one of its borders. Make sure you don't drag a handle. If you do you'll resize the box. So I am going to drag this little bit to the left and maybe a little bit down and that'll put it in the middle.

Now we can use the Format Ribbon to format the Text Box. So I'll click the Format button here and I've got some options I can use to format that text box. There are number of shape styles I can use. Just click this little button here and you get a menu of different styles. So you could choose something plain with a colored border or you can choose something shaded. Maybe I will go with something like this one here. It's got like a gradient in it. If I don't like the way that looks, I could choose something else. Maybe I'll go little bit plainer. If you prefer to format it manually, you can use the Fill menu and the Line menu to set fill colors and also line colors.

You can also use the Effects menu to add features like a Shadow or Reflection or Glow, anything you like. I might put a drop shadow around this, so I can choose this one here. It adds little bit of a shadow to it. As you can see, it's pretty easy to get a professionally looking text box that you can use to emphasize important points in your documents. If you think of a text box as it's own little word processing document, all you need to do is to insert it into text and format it so it meets your needs.