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I really think the Teacher of the Year news item needs a picture of Mr.
Doe. It is our top story.
To insert a picture into a document, place your insertion point where you want the image
to appear and select the Insert tab. In the Illustrations group, click the Picture
command. The Insert Picture dialog box will appear.
Locate your image file wherever you have it stored on your computer.
I have a good one of him stored on my Desktop. You can use the drop-down menu or the menu
options on the left of the dialog box to locate your image.
Select the Picture and click Insert and it will appear in your document.
Whoa! My picture is way too big! But that's not a problem.
I can resize it, just like I can clip art, shapes, and other illustrations.
Just make sure the picture is selected and left-click one of the corner sizing handles.
While holding down the left mouse button, move your mouse so that the image is smaller.
The corner sizing handles are great because they allow you to resize the image, but still
keep its same proportions. I've inserted my picture into the document,
but it doesn't look very good here. I really want to have it near the text, rather
than underneath it. To see all the picture formatting options,
first select the picture. Look closely and you will notice the new Picture
Tools Format menu that appeared on the Ribbon. From here, I can format the picture in so
many different ways. Let's start by wrapping the text around the
image, so that the picture of Mr. Doe doesn't appear under the text.
To do this, click the Text Wrapping command in the Arrange group.
Let's just left-click a menu option and move the image around to see how the text and image
look. Let me try Tight.
I want the text to appear near the image, but not over it, so this might be a good choice.
I also want the text to appear on the left and the image on the right, so let me move
this here. That's good.
I like the way this looks so far. If you can't get your text wrapping to work,
click More Layout Options at the bottom. The Advanced Layout dialog box appears and
from here you can make some additional changes about how to wrap the text.
Before I continue formatting my image, I'm going to add a little space between my newsletter
title and this Teacher of the Year section. This just gives me a little extra space for
formatting. Sometimes you may find that there is part
of an image that you want to crop. For example, in this image, I'd really like
to cut out a little of the chalkboard and Mr.
Doe's folded arms, and really have the image be primarily a headshot.
Just select the image, the Format tab, and click the Crop command on the Format tab.
The black cropping handles will appear. Just left-click and move a handle to crop
the image. Corner handles will crop the image proportionally,
but I really want to cut out some of the chalkboard, so I'll move this one in.
And crop a little off the bottom, too. Now click the Crop command again to deselect
this tool. After you've cropped, you can still resize
the image. Let's make it a little bit bigger.
There, that looks good. Cropping and resizing an image doesn't change
the image file size. Have you ever tried to email a picture to
someone, only to find out the file size was too big to send? The same thing can happen
with documents. You really need to watch the file size of
your images, so that you can store and send your documents easily.
You can decrease the file size of an image by compressing the image.
To compress an image, you'll first need to select it.
On the Format tab, click the Compress Pictures command in the Adjust group.
A dialog box appears. Let's click the Options button to access the
Compression Setting dialog box. Here we can see that by default, Word automatically
compresses pictures when you save the file and that parts of an image that are cropped
are deleted. Let's leave those default settings as they
are. Below you can select the Target output.
Print is selected by default, but if you are delivering a document online, you may want
to switch the output to Screen.I'm happy with these default settings though, so let's just
click OK. And then I'm going to click OK in the Compress
Pictures dialog box. We've got some other important commands in
the Adjust group here. If you're not happy with the picture, you
can click the Change Picture command and select a new picture from your computer or you can
click Reset Picture to go back to the original image you inserted.
The Brightness and Color commands allow you to adjust the image in different ways.
This is great, because for minor adjustments, you don't have to use a big photo editing
package. You can also click the Recolor command to
access some fun options. If you're printing in black and white, you
may want to change your images to black and white.
You can do so much with pictures in Word 2007 - way more than in previous versions.
One of the fun things you can do is reshape your picture.
What do I mean by reshape? Here, I'll show you! Make sure your picture is selected and
then click the Picture Shape icon on the Format tab.
You can select many different types of shapes. Some may not make sense, like this plus sign,
others may just be funny like this sunshine, and then some may look really good and work
with your document. When you find one you like, just left-click
it to select it. One of my favorite things about the new picture
tools are the great picture styles. Just make sure your picture is selected and
that you are on the Format tab. Click through the various styles and see how
they affect your picture. Pretty cool, huh? If you want to see all your
picture style options, click the More arrow in Picture Styles to see all the options.
This one is good, I like this Beveled Rectangle. Just left-click it to select it.
You know, I'd like to see what my image looks like with a border.
I can choose one of the bordered picture styles, or I can format my picture manually.
To add a border manually, left-click the Picture Border command and select a color.
That looks good, but I think the line should be heavier.
Select the Picture Border command again, and select Weight from the menu.
I like this 6 point weight, so I'll just select it.
I think Mr. Doe will be proud of what I've done to his
portrait! As you can see, there are lots of things you can do with pictures.
With the picture formatting options in Word 2007 there's no need for high-tech editing
software! You can easily do quality picture editing in a flash! Take awhile and explore
all the picture options and see how you might be able to use them in your documents.