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Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Microsoft Word 2007 - Page Layout Tab

Microsoft Word 2007 - Page Layout Tab








The Page Layout Tab lets you control the look and feel of your document in Microsoft Word 2007. You can apply a global design to your document by using one of the available themes and color schemes. You can also change the document orientation, page size, margins, indentation, line spacing and paragraph settings.

When you click on the Page Layout tab, this is similar to what you would see.




The first thing we are going to discuss is working with Themes. Themes are pre-defined and let you change the entire design using a combination of colors, font styles and formatting effects. Themes in Microsoft Word 2007 won't apply to the text if you don't have a style in place.

First you will need to use the Home tab to pick one of the Styles options. You can also click Change Styles and select a Style Set for the whole document. Since themes are set to work with the styles used in a document, you need to choose a style for all your headings, sub headings, and so forth.

Using this feature I was able to change my entire document to "Metro" theme. As I hovered over it, I was able to see a "Live Preview" on the right side. Note that the changes were only applied to the Header section and section headings. This is shown in the screen shot below:





The Theme did not affect my document text as it did not have a style applied to it. When I selected the heading, "Description of Organization" and browsed to the Home Tab, I did see that Heading 1 style had been applied to it.

This is shown as follows.





I don't know about you, but I am not a big fan of the bright green color for my headings. I can easily switch this by using the Built-In font colors under the Themes group. After you select this command, you will get a drop down list of several choices. I am going to select the Office color scheme which will switch the heading to blue. This is a fine color choice.

This step is shown in the screen capture below.





The last change I am going to make is to apply one of the Theme Fonts. This will leave the color scheme in place and just change the fonts. I will switch from Metro (blue rectangle) to Concourse (red rectangle) as shown in the next figure.






Next we will move on to the Page Setup group under the Page Layout Tab in Microsoft Word 2007. Using this tab, we can modify the structure layout of our document with details like margins, page size, orientation, line numbers etc.

I would like to modify the Definition Assignment document to use the Narrow margins instead of the Normal one. This will use more real estate on the page and trim 0.5 inch around all the borders. Here are the necessary steps shown by red rectangles.





When I did this, my document was updated using the Narrow margins. Here is the output from the action. I like the changes I have made so far so I will go ahead and Save the document. Like they say, "Save early, save often!"





Next what if you were trying to print address labels and needed to select a different paper size? No problem. From the Page setup group under the Page Layout tab, select Size and then Envelope #10. Caution: remember to feed the proper paper size in the Printer as well for this to work correctly in Microsoft Word 2007.

Here is a screen shot of what this should look like on your computer.





I really like this next feature. Currently I have a report that I am working on, but what if I was actually working on a newsletter or flier? In that case maybe I would want to split the text into two or more columns. Using the columns option in Page Setup group, you can do just that. Select Columns command and then choose Two.





After you have made the above selection, Microsoft Word 2007 will split the text in the report to two columns. It takes care of the formatting, margins, spacing and everything else automatically!!

The image below shows an output from this command of splitting a document into two columns.




Another common task is to use hyphens in your document. This conserves space and gives the document a more professional look. You can enable this automatically by using Hyphenation command under the Page Layout Tab.

A screen shot is as follows. Notice I have also shown you how to insert continuous line numbers here. This command is right above the Hyphenation button. This functionality could be useful if you are working on a legal document.





The hyphenation will split long words into two lines as shown below in the right colored rectangles



Let's move on to the next group, which is the Page Background. Here you can select Watermarks, Page Colors and Borders. For confidential or privacy type documents, you may want to use a Watermark. You can achieve this by selecting Watermark and picking one of the menu choices as shown below. Microsoft Word 2007 makes this a breeze by providing you Built-In options to do this task.






What if you wanted to add a little color to my document? You can select Page Color option under the Page Background group. How about bright Green, a little too bright I think!






The Page Layout Tab lets you also control indentation in your document. Indentation determines the distance of the paragraph from either the left or the right margin. I found a quotation in my document and this is a perfect candidate for indentation.

I am going to use 0.5 inch indent from the left and right side. Here is a screen shot of this action in red arrows.





The last option I want to discuss is the Spacing before and after paragraphs. We will use the same text as the previous example. The quote seems to be a little too close to the regular document text. I would like to add 18 pt (point) spacing to the top and bottom of this quote. I can easily do this by using the Spacing option under the Paragraph group in Microsoft Word 2007.

Shown below in red arrows is the affect of making this change.


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