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About this lesson

Frame the spot for a picture still to come.

Lesson versions

Multiple versions of this lesson are available, choose the appropriate version for you:

2016, 2019/365.

Quick reference

Pictures - Placeholders

A placeholder is an empty picture frame that reserves the space and allows you to insert the picture later. Alignment tools will help you center the picture.

When to use

Pictures can be inserted right away or at a later date. But you can continue with your project while waiting for the pictures by using the Placeholders (empty picture frames) to hold their spots.

Instructions:

Begin by opening the corresponding Exercise File with this lesson, or to go File, New and find the Newsletter (Soft Blue design).  Use Page 6 for this lesson.

  • Click the View Ribbon, turn on Boundaries and Graphics Manager.
  • Scroll to Page 6 of the template and Insert 3 Picture Placeholders.
                        
  • Move (click and drag) the placeholders to spread them out horizontally.
  • Click any placeholder and Insert, Picture, from file: Computer Monitor.png, then repeat with other pictures in the remaining 2 placeholders.
      
  • Fit the picture to the frame.
    1. Click the Picture.
    2. Click the Picture Tools, or right-click the Picture for the Crop tools.
      (If "Fit" isn't available, that means it is already showing the full picture.)
  • Fit: Resizes entire picture to FIT inside the picture frame.
     

 

Computer Tips

  • Ctrl + Scroll to zoom in is faster than pointing to the bottom right zoom controls. Zoom in or out quickly by holding down CTRL and scroll with your mouse wheel. 
  • To un-do anything, simply press Ctrl + Z, or click the un-do button on the Quick Access bar.

 

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  • 00:04 As you're building your newsletter you might have to save a spot for
  • 00:07 a picture that hasn't arrived yet from your photographer.
  • 00:10 The way you do that is on the Insert ribbon.
  • 00:13 We have an option for pictures, online pictures, shapes, and picture placeholder.
  • 00:18 This is a great feature because it's going to drop a little picture frame into
  • 00:23 your text area.
  • 00:24 I'll go ahead and click the picture placeholder, and
  • 00:26 it pops itself right there.
  • 00:28 And I can control zoom in.
  • 00:30 As you can see there's a little picture symbol within that box.
  • 00:33 When I click on that symbol it takes me to Fetch a picture from file, from online, or
  • 00:38 from a saved place up on the cloud.
  • 00:40 I'm going to click that right now.
  • 00:41 I want to show you what happens when I click off of that placeholder.
  • 00:44 So let me zoom out a little.
  • 00:46 I'm going to click into the margin area, and there we go.
  • 00:48 What's happened is we have nothing left except a blank spot on the screen.
  • 00:53 Now, if someone else worked on this, and you didn't,
  • 00:56 good luck knowing why there's a big white patch on your screen right there.
  • 01:00 Well, that's because we have to put some controls in place to identify what
  • 01:05 this is.
  • 01:05 The controls we're going to use are from the previous lesson about graphics
  • 01:09 manager.
  • 01:09 I’ll go ahead and click on that button, and here my graphics manager shows up, and
  • 01:14 it shows me an empty spot right there, hasn't even been named.
  • 01:17 Because there is no picture there, there is no name attached.
  • 01:20 I sort of like that it says empty.
  • 01:21 When I click it, it takes me right to that spot.
  • 01:25 Another way to control this is to view Boundaries.
  • 01:27 I'll go ahead and close my graphics manager,
  • 01:30 click off of that picture again so it vanishes.
  • 01:34 And on my View ribbon, we have an option that says Boundaries.
  • 01:38 Now I generally use this a lot.
  • 01:41 A lot of people don't like boundaries because look what just happened to all
  • 01:44 your text boxes, all your pictures just got frames on them,
  • 01:47 every text box has dotted lines on them.
  • 01:49 But what's important is your picture placeholder also has an edge on it, so
  • 01:53 it's easy to see at this point.
  • 01:55 I haven't clicked on it, and I can see it just fine.
  • 01:58 But a lot of people resist using their boundaries because it
  • 02:01 just looks too cluttered, so they'll turn that off.
  • 02:04 You just have to make a decision, what are you going to do?
  • 02:06 Are you going to hopefully know that's a white spot, or
  • 02:08 are you going to use your boundaries?
  • 02:10 I'm going to choose to use the boundaries.
  • 02:11 All right, I want to take you to the bottom of the very last page of this, and
  • 02:15 I'm going to put in three picture placeholders right here.
  • 02:18 So I'm going to Insert Picture placeholder, and it popped up right there.
  • 02:22 Now watch it when I do two more times.
  • 02:24 Insert placeholder, insert placeholder.
  • 02:25 Do you see all three of them there?
  • 02:27 No, they just stacked up on top of each other.
  • 02:30 Again, let's use the control called the graphics manager.
  • 02:34 When I click the graphics manager, here we go, empty, empty, empty.
  • 02:39 They're still stacked, so it looks like I didn't do anything.
  • 02:42 So I'm going to click and drag these to separate them on the screen.
  • 02:44 Please notice the lines that are appearing, the pink lines,
  • 02:47 is showing the top and bottom, whether it's lined up or not.
  • 02:51 So as I click and drag I know I'm still perfectly aligned.
  • 02:54 I'm going to take this one, I'm going to move this over as well.
  • 02:57 Looking for my guidelines as I click and drag, and let go.
  • 03:00 All right, so now I can jump to whatever one, on whatever page.
  • 03:06 So that is a wonderful control using that graphics manager.
  • 03:10 All right, now I'm going to insert a picture into these,
  • 03:13 simply by clicking on the center of the box.
  • 03:16 And I'm going to go to Browse from the file, and we're going to go ahead and
  • 03:20 put the computer mouse right here.
  • 03:22 And I can just keep doing this and go get all these little pictures.
  • 03:27 Of course, we can use the Crop button, we can make them fit,
  • 03:30 we can make them fill whatever we want.
  • 03:32 We can do all of this, and I'm going to close this graphics manager.
  • 03:37 I want to show you one more trick about cropping these.
  • 03:39 Wouldn't it be great if it was easier to get to the crop
  • 03:42 than trying to remember where it's located?
  • 03:45 Well, it is.
  • 03:46 When you right-click on any photo, we have this entire right-click menu, but
  • 03:50 right down here we have what's called the mini bar.
  • 03:53 Now, the mini bar is a gift from the gods of Microsoft, okay?
  • 03:56 When you right-click on any photo, It's going to give you all the photo options.
  • 04:01 One of them is the Crop, and now I can choose to crop it to fit, to fill,
  • 04:04 to clear the crop, whatever you'd like to do.
  • 04:06 So you don't have to remember where to go, which is, by the way, Format, Crop.
  • 04:12 See, that takes my mouse away from where my eyes are working, but a right-click and
  • 04:15 to have the crop on that shortcut menu, that's kind of great.
  • 04:18 All right, thank you.

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