Text box - Formatting Tools

Quick reference

• 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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