It's A Wrap With Word 2007

Quite often it can be a case of hit or miss when you are working with pictures and text. For example, you want to place your logo - saved as a jpeg and inserted into your Microsoft Word 2007 document as a picture file - into a an area of text in order to create a personalised presentation. The logo seems to be the right size, but as soon as it's placed next to your text, the type jumps down a line, or there's too much white space above the image. You don't want your presentation to give the wrong message - you need to have a document which looks polished and reflects the effort you've put into getting the wording right, too.

Microsoft Office Word 2007 enables you to get text and images working together to create a professional document without any odd looking space or alignments between words and pictures. Text Wrapping gives you that control and ensures that your text runs correctly around pictures, shapes and tables.

When you first insert a picture or logo into a document, Word 2007 places it in line with the text. But sometimes you might want the text to wrap around the picture. So here's the easy solution: when you need to change the text wrapping style, select the picture, click the Text Wrapping button in the Arrange group on the Format tab, and choose an option from the menu. Now you can select how your image sits alongside text - including Tight, or Square, or Behind.

Tight wrapping ensures that the image sits as close as possible to the text. When you choose Tight wrapping (or any other type of wrapping other than In Line with Text), the image becomes a free-floating object and is no longer tied to a specific position within the text. You can drag the picture to any position in the document. You can even put it right in the middle of a paragraph, and Word 2007 wraps the text around both sides.

To determine which style of text wrapping you want to use, select the object and, in the Arrange tab, go to Position. Here you can choose the position you would like to apply and also preview the effect before selecting. You can choose, for example, from In Line with Text or With Text Wrapping. The More Layout Options allows you to have even greater control over the picture position and alignment.

The default wrapping option in Word 2007 - the In Line with Text wrapping - places the image in line with the text. The height of the line on which the picture appears is adjusted to match the height of the image, but this can easily be altered to how you want it.

If you select the Behind Text option, the picture will sit behind the text, or on top of the text by selecting Infront of Text. Just as it sounds, the Square wrapping option wraps the text squarely around the picture.

When you insert a picture in Word 2007, it defines a series of "wrap points" around the picture. By default there are four wrap points that surround the perimeter of the picture, forming a rectangle. When you wrap text around the picture, the wrap points define how close the text can come to the picture. Other wrapping options include Wrap Top and Bottom, and Through wrapping.

If you want, you can create custom wrapping of text by editing the wrap points so they more closely reflect exactly what you want. By selecting Edit Wrap Points, you can determine your own wrapping shape around your image by dragging the handles on a wrapping outline. This tool is especially useful when you have more confidence about using text Wrapping with words and images.

Word 2007 even has the option to Wrap text Around a Table. To set the horizontal and vertical position of the table, the distance from surrounding text, and other options, under Text Wrapping, click Positioning, and then choose the options that you need to use.

And if this has whetted your appetite to learn more about how to work with text and pictures, why not get some professional training and really get a handle on how to wrap?