Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Microsoft Word Design Tab and Ribbon in Depth”.
In this article I will show you how to use the Microsoft Word, design, Tab and ribbon in depth. Let’S get started so here I am in a Word document and if I browse down here, you can see the actual beginning of the document and it’s coming together. Pretty well, it looks pretty good, but I’m going to use the Microsoft Word, design, Tab and the tools that appear on the ribbon when you click design to maybe make some changes and enhance this document. This video is one in a series and just like in the other videos in the series I’m going to start here at the left and just work. My way, all the way, through the ribbon to the right side as we learn all of the tools and features on the design tab. So the first thing we see at the left when we click on the design tab is a themes button. If you click that button word shows you a series of themes that you could choose from the themes consist of different font, sizes, font types and color schemes.
Now those color schemes don’t always come into play with just text on the screen. You can see that the color of my title is changing yes, but some of the other color schemes only become apparent when you start inserting objects, Graphics, shapes Etc, but we can use this themes button to easily and quickly change the theme of our document. The entire document has been adjusted based on the theme that I chose. If I change my mind, I can click on themes again and make a different choice. Now, fortunately, you don’t have to select a specific theme in order to see what it would do to your document. You can just put your mouse over a particular theme without clicking and Microsoft.
Word gives you a preview of what that will do to your document. What it’ll make it look like. I kind of like this look and feel so I’ll click on that and my document is changed to match that new theme. At any point, I can go back to the themes, button and choose reset to theme from template, and then that takes me back to the way the document was before.
I started changing the theme, but I happen to really like this theme that I chose so I’m going to stick with that. It is also possible to browse for themes, so you could download themes to your computer and then browse for them and import them in to your documents. One last thing to be aware of: if you go here to the themes button, you can save your current setup as a theme, so maybe I changed some of the fonts and also some of the colors and maybe a few other adjustments to the document. I could then save those choices as a theme.
I could give that theme a name and in the future I’ll be able to access that saved custom theme and reuse it over and over. So that’s a good feature to have. Okay, with my new theme, I’m ready to move on to the next part of the Microsoft Word, design, Tab and ribbon. You can see that themes is just one part of the document, formatting group.
So let’s look at the rest rest of the group. What we have is this long set of options that I can choose from, and these are style sets in some ways, they’re similar to themes, and once again, you can just put your mouse on top of a style set to get a preview of it. There’S an interesting one: here’s another one, that’s kind of nice, and so once again we can get a preview of what choosing a particular style set may do to our document.
If you go here to the right edge of the style, sets there’s a button that, if you click it, it will pop open with even more style sets to choose from. You can also reset to the default style set and there’s an option to set up a new style set and then save it, and so by using these themes and style sets. We can really hone in on and set a very specific look and feel for our documents. I’M going to go with this one, and now, let’s move on to the next tool in the document formatting group, it is colors. So with my mouse on the colors button, you can see that my current theme called Gallery comes with specific theme colors and you can see what those are. But if I click I can change those to be something else, and now my style sets are also updated. You can see that now the colors match this color scheme instead of the old color scheme. Now, by choosing one of these color schemes, I can pretty well ensure that whatever style set, I choose and whatever colors within this palette, that I choose that they’re going to look good together. That’S the idea behind using these color sets or color schemes, and yes, a specific one, was chosen for the style set and theme that I had picked.
But I can force a change on those colors and choose a different color scheme. If I’d like, it’s even possible to customize the color schemes that you get here, so if I click customize colors, I can go through and change any of this to make it exactly the way I want it to be. I get a preview here at at the right, a sample of what it will look like, and then I can name my customized color scheme, I’m just going to cancel out of that, but that’s an exciting option, especially for those of you that are designing handouts, Publications, Magazines, things like that that need a very specific color scheme and look and feel let’s move on to the next button, and that is fonts and this works similarly to the colors button.
If I put my mouse on the fonts button, it tells me what the current theme is. It’S the gallery theme, that’s what I chose back here at the beginning and because of that I have a very specific font for the heading and also for the body and that font is applied again because of the theme that I chose. But if I click here I can adjust it. Maybe I like everything about the theme except for the fonts. Well, I can adjust it to be a little bit different font.
How about this one and similar to the colors button. It is possible to customize fonts again again what, if I like everything about the theme and the fonts, it’s all great, but I wish that the body font was slightly different. I could make that change. Give my new custom font set a name and save it.
I’Ll cancel out of that. Okay, let’s move on to the next tool in the document formatting group, it’s called paragraph spacing if I click there, I can see that I have the basic or elegant paragraph spacing selected, but if I want to, I can switch to no paragraph space, I’m going to Undo that so you can see the difference right now. I do have some space between paragraphs, but if I change it to no paragraph space, you can see after a paragraph it goes into the next heading and then immediately after onto the next paragraph, with paragraph spacing turned on, we do get a little more space between Those text elements I’m going to go back to paragraph spacing and click and I’ll switch it to compact. So here we do get some spacing, but it’s just very little.
It’S quite compact. We also have tight spacing we have open, spacing, there’s a little more space now between the text elements and we have relaxed. That gives us even more spacing and even between lines in the paragraphs, and we have double spacing. So if you need to turn in a paper and you’re supposed to use double spacing, this is a quick way to do that. Just go to the design tab in the document. Formatting group and choose paragraph spacing double. We can also set some custom paragraph spacing so I’m going to click there and here toward the bottom, where it says line spacing. I could change it to at least maybe 14 point.
It’S also possible to set it to be exactly 14 point or whatever other number. You want to choose, I’m going to click, okay and it changes my document. So definitely try to remember and think about this paragraph spacing tool. There are a lot of good features here that really change how the reader experienced es your document. Let’S move on to the effects button and for this I’m going to need a shape or an object in my document.
So I’m going to go to the insert Tab and to the illustrations group, I’ll click on shapes and I’m just going to insert an oval. But I’ll hold shift on the keyboard and that will force the oval to be a perfect circle. So there’s my shape now that I’ve got that in my document I can go back to the design, Tab and I’ll go to the effects button and I’ll.
Just put my mouse on the different effect options that we have and we get a little preview of what my circle will look like if I choose a particular effect now, a lot of these options look very subtle right. If I change it to that, it looks one way, but if I go back into effects and change it to this, it looks slightly different. But again, a lot of these changes are for power, users or people that are going to be publishing and want to make sure that the do document looks exactly the way they need it to look. Now we have one more tool in the document formatting group.
It’S set as default. Let’S say that I work for a business or an organization, and we’ve decided that all of our documents should have this exact theme and style set. The color schemes should just be exactly like this document, and the effects should all be consistent.
The paragraph spacing I could click this button and set this look as the default as it says here use this look for all new documents. Every time I create a new blank document, it will be formatted just the way you like, I’m not going to click this button, but just be aware that you can do that. Let’S say you find yourself always typing double spaced papers and the font size is always 11o font and you want it to always be that maybe you always want aerial font or Times New Roman.
Why not set up a document with those options and features the way you want them to be, and then click set as default? Okay, let’s move on to our second and final group on the Microsoft Word: design, Tab and ribbon, and that is Page background. I’M going to browse down here to a new page and let’s say I really would like to have some background elements behind my text. Let’S start with a watermark, I’m going to click here to select Watermark and, as you can see, there are different locations for the water mark, different angles, different sizes and things like that. I’M going to go with do not copy and I’ll have it be angled. When I select that I get my Watermark, it’s put right into the document. If I go back into Watermark notice that I could get more watermarks from office.com, I could remove my Watermark, which is what I’m going to do.
I’Ll click that and it’s gone, but there’s also an option to create a custom, Watermark I’ll click there right now it’s set to no watermark, but I could switch that to picture Watermark and select a picture. That’S on my computer. That picture will be washed out. If I want it to be, and it will be placed in the background behind my text as a watermark in many cases, though, you want your watermark not to be an image but to be text.
So, for example, I’m going to click here on text Watermark, I could change the language if I want to the font type the font size color. All of this also the angle of the text. Do I want it to be laid out, diagonally or horizontally, and then here is where you type the message or the text that you want to turn into a watermark. So I want it to be a URL for this synth pop blog.
I type in that address. Click: okay and there’s my new Watermark, it’s a custom Watermark that will show up whenever someone looks at this document digitally or if they print it, either way. If you click and drag and select some text in your document, it is also possible to click on Watermark and then save a selection to The Watermark Gallery. That’S never come up for me, but if you’re interested you could explore that and see how that works.
Okay, let’s move on to the page color button in the page background group so anywhere in my document I can click and then choose page color and change it from no color to a very specific color. I, of course, can change my mind and change it to any of these other colors there’s standard colors. I can even get get more colors. If I would like, I could kind of browse through this color set and choose the exact colors I want, or if I know the RGB numbers for the exact color that I need. I can put those in here red 122, green, let’s say 200 and blue 59. That gives me the exact color that we see here same with hex numbers.
If you know the hex number of the specific color you want, you can just plug that in and you’ll get that color for now I’ll, just click. Okay and my page color changes now notice. It doesn’t just change the current page.
All pages in my document have taken on that new page color. In addition to changing the color, you can adjust the fill effects. So do you want there to be a gradient effect? I sure don’t. But if you do, you can add that, and there are other fill effects that you can play around with I’m going to go back to page color and switch to no color okay, it’s time for our final tool. In the page background group – and that is Page borders – if I click on that, I can switch it from no page border to a box or a shadow 3D or custom.
I’M going to go with Shadow click. Okay and now I get a nice shadow box around my pages – let’s go back to page borders and I could switch up the style of this page border, make it a dashed line instead of a solid line. I could change the width of the line and, after making these changes notice that here in the lower right corner of this dialogue box that opened up, I have the option of applying these changes to the whole document, or just to this specific page or section. In my document, I think I’ll leave it at whole document.
I do have a few other options here in this options button and you can explore that if you’re interested, but at this point I’m just going to click. Okay and my page border has been adjusted and it adds that nice finished touch to this document. So in this article, we’ve looked at the Microsoft Word, design, Tab and ribbon in depth, and I hope you’ve learned about some new features and options that you weren’t aware of previously each of these options and features on the design tab deal with what our document looks. Like the page color, the font type, the graphic effects Etc, and it’s important to be aware of these options so that you can make your document look exactly the way you want it to thanks for watching watching. I hope you found this tutorial to be helpful. If you did please like follow And subscribe, and when you do click the bell and you’ll be notified when I post another video, if you’d like to support my channel the best way to do that is to become a channel member when you join this channel as A channel member you’ll be able to choose from three different tiers and receive nice perks, including access to a behindthescenes membersonly podcast.
You could also support the channel by clicking the thanks button below the video you could support me through my patreon account, or by buying Channel merch and you’ll, see information about those options in the description below the video .