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About this lesson
Review toolbar and connect text boxes and word overflow.
Lesson versions
Multiple versions of this lesson are available, choose the appropriate version for you:
2016, 2019/365.
Quick reference
Textbox - Formatting Tools
Review and use the Textbox Formatting tools available on the ribbon.
When to use
There are some creative options available when it’s time to format a text box. Use these features often.
Instructions
Click into any textbox (or click Insert ribbon, Draw Textbox) and review the tools available to format textboxes.
Text Fit Text Direction
Hyphenation
Font Group
Alignment Group Margins
Columns
Tip: When working with columns, turn on “Boundaries”.
- View Ribbon.
- Boundaries.
- Then the column dividers are viewable.
Linking: Create a link to handle Overflow Text.
Overflow Text
- When a text box is too small for the text length, it will appear with red handles to warn you that some of the text is not viewable.
- By activating the tiny ellipsis button on the text box, you can “spill” the text into another textbox. Essentially creating overflow text to a new box.
- To find where the original text came from, a new handle on the overflow box will appear.
- 00:05 This lesson is about the technical aspects of the text box, all right?
- 00:10 So I'm going to stay with the newsletter soft blue design because it is rampant
- 00:14 with text boxes.
- 00:15 So it's a great example.
- 00:16 Here we go. On the front page,
- 00:18 I'm just floating my mouse.
- 00:19 I'm not clicking anywhere, just floating my mouse,
- 00:22 and you can see the outer edges of the text boxes appear and disappear.
- 00:25 Now I will go ahead and click the outer edge of this text box, and
- 00:28 notice up above we have two ribbons, Drawing Tools because the text
- 00:32 box is a square that could be colored, and then Text Box Tools.
- 00:36 Now when I activate this Text Box Tools, the formatting,
- 00:38 notice most of this is grayed out, it's not available.
- 00:41 Because the text box contains two elements,
- 00:44 the box itself and the text within it.
- 00:47 So all the grayed out areas are for the text because I am not clicked on the text.
- 00:50 I'm simply clicked on the outer edge, and I'm making a big deal out of this for
- 00:54 a reason.
- 00:55 You will be frustrated that you can't format your text right now.
- 00:58 Well, you're not clicked onto the text.
- 01:00 Now the moment I click onto the text, look at that ribbon.
- 01:03 Everything lines up, all right?
- 01:05 Let's deal with the text box, the outer edge.
- 01:08 Please, I want to draw your attention to the space between,
- 01:11 I'm going to zoom in here so you can see it a little better.
- 01:14 Look at the space, the empty space between the story headline and
- 01:18 the edge of the box.
- 01:19 It looks like about a quarter of an inch.
- 01:21 That is called a margin.
- 01:23 Well, sometimes you will be running out of room.
- 01:25 You'll be trying to get everything to fit, and it'll be an act of desperation.
- 01:30 And you'll think, if I could only lessen that margin.
- 01:32 Well, you can.
- 01:33 When you click on the edge of the text box, we come up here to the Text Box Tools
- 01:36 > Format, notice we have a button right here that says Margins.
- 01:39 When I hit that drop down arrow, please watch.
- 01:42 I will have none narrow, moderate wide custom margins.
- 01:46 I'm going to hit None, keep your eyes on that margin down in the text box and
- 01:50 I'm going to click None.
- 01:52 Click, there we go.
- 01:54 Now, it looks fine.
- 01:55 It's going to look fine when you print this in,
- 01:57 it's going to look absolutely fine.
- 01:59 But it just saves you a lot of frustration, all right?
- 02:01 So that's why we change our margins.
- 02:04 Now another thing you can do is we can change the columns.
- 02:07 So I'll go ahead and click Columns, and we can changes this to One Column,
- 02:10 Two Columns, Three Columns or more.
- 02:12 I'll go ahead and click Two Columns.
- 02:14 Now you might wonder why in the world would we bothered to split up a paragraph into
- 02:19 columns.
- 02:19 Because a lot of paragraphs will stretch across the entire document and
- 02:23 it looks more like a college essay that you're reading, and
- 02:26 no one gets excited about reading an essay.
- 02:28 So if you divide it up into, I don't know, newspaper column format,
- 02:32 it's a lot easier for your reader to scan across the columns.
- 02:36 Faster for them to read, and they might be happier about reading it.
- 02:39 Always use columns whenever possible when you're working on newsletters.
- 02:43 All right, there's one other thing in here that you've already seen in our
- 02:47 previous lesson about overflow text.
- 02:49 You're familiar with these red frames and handles.
- 02:52 Well, that is called linking, create links.
- 02:55 Now, what I showed you in a previous lesson was hit the little yellow ellipsis.
- 02:59 Well, that is the same as hitting this Create Link, right?
- 03:02 One is right on the screen, the other one you have to go fetch under the toolbar.
- 03:06 So when I hit Create Link, there's my cute little measuring cup, and
- 03:09 now I can spill the alphabet soup into the next box beside it, all right?
- 03:13 These arrows tell us which box we had spilled it from, all right?
- 03:17 So regardless, let's go ahead and move on to the text.
- 03:21 So I've got text highlighted, and if I right-click,
- 03:23 way up here we have a minibar.
- 03:25 But if I just click and drag in that box and let go,
- 03:28 my minibar just magically appears.
- 03:31 I like this because it's most of the options right there on my text box tools
- 03:35 anyway, okay?
- 03:36 I like them right beside my mouse.
- 03:38 But the text box tools has a few that aren't on the minibar,
- 03:41 one of them is text direction.
- 03:43 Maybe your printing a different way, and you didn't turn your paper sideways so
- 03:47 you were going to turn your text sideways.
- 03:49 Personally I'm not going to do that, but you have the option.
- 03:51 Hyphenation, it's very acceptable to hyphenate words, all right?
- 03:54 I guess these are already hyphenated.
- 03:57 Anyway, you can turn that on.
- 03:59 It's already set for automatically, or you can turn it off.
- 04:02 So if you don't want anything hyphenated,
- 04:04 then it'll leave larger gaps at the end of the sentences.
- 04:08 It's always appropriate to hyphenate words, that's okay.
- 04:11 Moving right along, we have all our Font styles.
- 04:14 Here's a little tip, any button with the letter A means alphabet text.
- 04:18 So all of these are going to change text, it's going to change your alignment,
- 04:23 we had an entire lesson on word art styles.
- 04:25 And so I'm going to skip that but
- 04:26 I want to go to typography because this is awesome.
- 04:29 The typography allows you to use drop caps in storybook format.
- 04:34 Kind of great.
- 04:35 It depends on the theme you are trying to use for your newsletter, but
- 04:38 all of these are kind of great.
- 04:40 We've got ligatures, number styles.
- 04:41 style sets, stylistic alternate.
- 04:43 Use whatever you'd like to use.
- 04:45 Dress it up if it's appropriate.
- 04:46 Keep it professional at all times.
- 04:48 But there's a lot to know about text box formatting.
- 04:51 Practice with that.
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