Inserting Graphics

Modules >>
Word Processing I >>
Inserting Graphics

Inserting graphics into documents is useful to communicate ideas visually as well as through text. Pictures on flyers make them more catchy. Class handouts with graphics can help students understand concepts better - especially when "a picture is worth a thousand words." For your assignment, you will insert a graphic underneath the previous work in your assignment. Put your cursor where you want the graphic inserted by clicking on that location in your document. You may choose to insert an image of your own or choose a clipart from the selection provided in Word. To insert a graphic,

Go to the Insert menu
Select Picture, and then
Choose Clip Art if you choose to insert clip art. Otherwise, if you wanted to insert an image of your own, then choose From File. Select the graphic of your choice and click "Insert." The image will appear in your document.

Clip art images can sometimes appear very large. If this is the case, click on the graphic to select it. You will see "handles at the corners as shown below:

You can click and drag these handles to resize the image. This graphic can also be moved around your document by clicking and dragging it.

Format Picture

Now that you have a picture in your document, it might be useful to format that picture to meet your document needs. This may include adjusting the colour, brightness, or contrast, cropping the picture, wrapping text around the picture, positioning the picture on the page (locking it in one spot or letting it float), resizing and keeping scale, and using colour and lines with your picture. In this module, we will cover only the colour and lines and text wrapping.

For your assignment, you will format the picture to colour it with a semi-transparent colour and place a border around it. To do this,

Select the picture by clicking on it once, then
Go to the Format menu and
Choose Picture.
A shortcut is to right-click on top of the image and choose "Format Picture."
In the pop-up window, go to the Colors and Lines tab shown below.
Choose the colour red for the "Fill" colour and then
Put a check in the box for "Semitransparent." Under the Line section, choose the colour black for the line around your picture and make its weight "2 pt." the settings are shown below.

Your image should have a shaded colour to it with a thick border around it. If the above racecar picture was formatted this way, it would appear as follows:

Next, for your assignment, you will learn how to wrap text around this image.

Select your picture by clicking on it once, then
Go to the Format Picture window once more,
But this time click on the Wrapping tab to get the following screen:

Choose Square for the wrapping style by clicking on the box shown
Next, choose to wrap to the Right
Click OK. You will now be able to place your cursor to the right of the picture and type in text. Our race car example would appear as shown below.

Note, if your text does not wrap as above, you might want to make sure that you have pressed Enter once or twice after the paragraph that appears before the image. If the image appears on the right side of the window, click and drag it to the left side of the window.

If you are interested about learning the other features available in formatting, explore the other three tabs available to you in the Format Picture window (Size, Position, and Picture). Save your document and move on to the next section on Tabs, Bullets, and Numbering.