March 4, 2009

Shape Up Your WordArt

Do you often find you want WordArt in your document, but you actually only want it to appear to be inside a shape?

What did you do?

You could create the shape and the WordArt separately and then group them together. With older versions of the MS Office Suite, that's pretty much what you're going to have to do.

But if you have one of the newer versions of Office, you could actually put the WordArt inside the shape pretty much the same way you'd enter regular text into a shape. (Just a side note: I couldn't get my Office XP to do this trick, so it will have to be newer than that).

Now, I'm sure someone out there is wondering why you'd want to do this at all.

That's a good question and I think I have a pretty good reason as to why it's a good plan!

It's a purely practical reason if there ever was one. If the WordArt is actually inside the shape as its text, when you resize or move your shape, it also affects the WordArt. One stop formatting works for me, how about you?!

Assuming this sounds like a good plan to you, here's what you need to know to make this tip work for you.

First, insert the shape.
The second step is to right click on the shape and choose Add Text from the menu that pops up.
You'll now find your cursor inside the shape. While it's still in there, you need to start and create the needed WordArt.

That's it! Once the WordArt is created, it's in the shape and it will change as necessary to match any changes made to the shape.

I found that if I changed the size of the WordArt, the shape would adjust in size too.

On the other hand, if you change the size of the shape, the WordArt stays the same size and adjusts its position within the shape, just as regular text would do.

However, when relocating the shape, the WordArt always goes with it.

I should add that there were very few times I tried this one and wasn't happy with the outcome. So, it's not perfect, but overall, I love it and it's definitely worth the time to learn how to do it!