Microsoft Word 2007: Take a Tour of Special Features

Microsoft Word 2007 offers several new special features such as line numbers, automatic hyphenation, watermarks, and picture repositioning. Follow along with this demonstration to learn how to use these handy new features. Let's start with some sample text.

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The first feature we'll review is line numbers. Line numbers are useful when collaborating on documents with a group. When you're reviewing the document, you can simply refer to a line number to find specific text, rather than scanning through paragraphs. Line numbers can also be useful in scripts and legal documents.

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To view line numbers in Word, you need to be in the Page Layout view. This is different than the Page Layout tab on the Ribbon. Verify that Page Layout is your current view or switch to it now.

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First Click the View tab and verify that Page Layout is selected in the Document Views group to the left.

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Then return to the Page Layout tab on the Ribbon.

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In the Page Setup group, open the Line Numbers drop-down list.

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In the drop-down menu that appears, select Continuous. Note that you have several options to customize line numbering, including restarting on each page or suppressing for the current paragraph.

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Line numbers appear in the left margin; returns are included in the count.

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If you want to turn off line numbering, open the Line Numbers drop-down menu again…

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and select None.

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The line numbers no longer appear. The next feature we'll review is automatic hyphenation. When using the full justification option on your margins, you'll probably want to have Word automatically hyphenate words throughout your document. Let's enable that by opening the Hyphenation drop-down list, which is also in the Page Setup group of the Page Layout tab.

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From the drop-down list that appears, select Automatic. This will turn on Automatic Hyphenation.

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Notice that Word has automatically hyphenated the text. In the first line, "impossible" is now hyphenated rather than appearing on the second line. All the margins are fully justified rather than being left justified.

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Now let's learn how to add a watermark to your document. A watermark is a picture or text that appears in the background of a document, usually in a light color. One use of a watermark is to indicate the status of a document, such as Draft or Confidential. Or, you may want to include your company's logo to brand the document.

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To add a watermark to a document, select Watermark from the Page Background group of the Page Layout tab.

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A menu appears with preset options in the gallery, or you can select Custom Watermark.

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If you select Custom Watermark, a pop-up dialog box appears. You can see that options include a picture watermark, but let's create a textual watermark.

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Let's start by selecting the Text watermark option in the dialog box.

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Open the Text drop-down list and select the text of your choice. For this example, let's use Draft.

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You can change the font, size and color of the watermark. To change the default color, which is light gray, open the Color list.

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From the menu that appears, select the color of your choice.

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Once you've made the changes you want, click Apply…

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and then click Close.

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Let's scroll down so that we can see how the watermark appears in the background of the document.

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The final special feature we'll review in this demo is picture repositioning. Let's add a picture to the document and see how easy it is to reposition it.

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Start by clicking the Insert tab and…

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then click Picture.

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In the dialog box that appears, you can select the picture of your choice. For this demo, let's choose the Garden picture.

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Once you've made your selection, click Insert.

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The Picture Tools are now displayed. To resize the picture, right-click the image and select Size.

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A Size dialog box appears. Change the Height and Width values. Notice that you can keep the proportions the same and the original size is displayed at the bottom.

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Let's make the image 20 percent of the original size and then close the dialog box.

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But now the picture appears in the middle of the text. This is not where we want the picture, so the picture needs to be repositioned.

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On the Picture Tools Format tab, select Position in the Arrange group.

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A drop-down menu appears with various options. Select one of the preset position options. For this demo, we're choosing Top Left with Square Text Wrapping.

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Now the image appears in the top left corner of our document, with the text wrapping around it. Notice that new words are now automatically hyphenated and the watermark is faintly visible behind the last lines of our text.

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In this demonstration, we reviewed four time saving features in Word 2007. You learned about line numbering, automatic hyphenating, watermarks and picture repositioning. Now you're ready to use these special features to improve your documents by making them more useful and more visually appealing.