From the course: Word 2013 Essential Training

Adding pizzazz with special text effects - Microsoft Word Tutorial

From the course: Word 2013 Essential Training

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Adding pizzazz with special text effects

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Aside from applying basic formatting, like color, and bold, italics, changing the case, like we did in the previous movie, there are some special effects you can apply to text as well to really add pizzazz. Of course, it depends on the document you're working with, and you never want to overdo it. So, let's take a look now as we continue working with are No Obstacles Home Recipes document. If you've jumped to this lesson, and need to get caught up, go to the Chapter3 folder, and open up No Obstacles Home Recipes3. We're on the first page here looking at the title. We have already made some changes to the font, the size, the color; let's apply some other formatting. Let's go to the left-hand margin next to Essential Veggie Recipes, and click and drag down, so we get both lines. Now, here you can see bold has already been applied. We have already taken a look at using italics, and underlining, and we changed the color, but if we wanted to apply some special effects, we don't see them here on this little pop-up option. We need to go to the ribbon, and that's where you'll find this little guy called Text Effects and Typography. Give that a click, and you'll see a number of options that you might see as familiar if you're comfortable with previous versions of Microsoft PowerPoint; way back to version 2007, for example, we started to see some of these text effects for creating slides. Now, as you hover over these, you are going to see a nice real-time preview in the background. So, when you see something you like, all you have to do is select it. I am thinking this one down here might look good, or maybe this one with the reflection. Let's give that a click, and it's applied. We can deselect by clicking anywhere on the page, and you can see that really does make our title stand out. Now, if we want to clear all formatting altogether, and just start from scratch, we can go that too, also from the font section on the ribbon. This little guy up here next to our change case dropdown will clear all formatting. Let's give it a click, and that's for that line. Let's go up to the first line, and do the same thing there. And now we have our text with no formatting whatsoever. So, let's click and drag over that, and let's make some changes now. Let's go, first of all, to our Paragraph section, and change it to Centered. That's part of formatting. Let's go to the font dropdown, and choose a cool font, like Arial Black; that one really stands out. Now, we don't need any bolding, or anything with that, but maybe some size changing would be good. Let's go to the size dropdown, and as we hover over 24, we see all of a sudden we need three lines, so let's go back to 20. That's perfect right there. With a bigger, heavier font like that, we don't need as large a size. And now let's apply some effects. Go to the Effect dropdown, and you'll notice, aside from these presets, we also have Outline options to change the color of the outline around the outside. This works well with a very heavy font, like Arial Black. We can also apply a Shadow, and as we move over, you can see some Outer shadows, some Inner shadows, and some Perspective as well, and you get to see a real-time preview in the background for those as well. Not so sure shadow is exactly what we need, so let's go to Reflection now. As, again, we hover over these Reflection Variations, we see real-time previews going on in the background. Some reflections are longer than others. Some actually are separated from the text. I am thinking just this first one is subtle enough; I will give it a click, and deselect. Kind of cool! The only thing that would really make this stand out a little more now is to change the color, so let's click and drag across both lines, and we'll go to our color dropdown. Again, we want to choose Theme Colors. If we do change the theme of our document, the colors will change with it. If we go down to Standard Colors, or even More Colors, yes, we have more options, but then we are not going to able to see those changes translate to our new themes. Let's go down to Gradient, and try something here. I see some options for gradients, and again, we are going to see lighter in the bottom, or the top, diagonal gradients; we'll chose one that suits our needs, but maybe it would be nice if we were using different colors. Let's go down to More Gradients. That opens up a pane over here on the right. You can see Gradient Fill is an option under Text Fill. Now we can choose things like presets, and these involve color. I like this one here. We will give it a click, deselect to see what that looks like, and it's a little bit difficult to read. Notice that we can adjust these, so let's reselect our text, and let's go to the Gradient Stops. Again, drag the slider, so we have less of the lighter colors. We can even change the color, for that matter, to something darker; maybe a darker blue. And now let's deselect to see what that looks like. Very cool! So, we are really adding pizzazz here to our document. This is just a title page, so it's somewhat appropriate. We wouldn't, obviously, want all of our content to be formatted this way. It's really for special occasions. Let's close this up. Feel free to experiment with some of the text effects here in Word 2013.

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