While designing MS Word 2010, it seems that the people of Microsoft put a lot of emphasis on giving the user more options to personalize the visual aspect of his or her documents.

A new feature that exemplifies this perfectly is the variety of special effects that can now be added to WordArt. If you remember, all you could really do was pick a style of WordArt to use in earlier versions of Word. In MS Word 2010, you are now able to customize those textual graphics with lots of different effects, allowing you to really personalize them and make them your own.  

Let’s take a look at how it works.

First we’ll type a word into a blank document file – “Word” will do. Highlight the word and then go to the Insert menu. Here you will see the WordArt icon in the Text part of the ribbon.

When you click on the WordArt icon, you should get a dropdown menu that looks like this:

Now click on the WordArt style you like best.

Once you have selected the style you want, you will notice that the Drawing Tools menu will be displayed immediately. If you don’t see it, this means that you have probably clicked off of the WordArt. Click back onto the WordArt text and the menu should reappear.

Click on Format right under Drawing Tools. This is where you will see most of the pertinent options for personalizing your WordArt.

We will now take you through the ones that give you brand new options that you didn’t have in earlier versions of MS Word.

Let’s first take a look at the WordArt Styles section of the ribbon first, because it is obviously more pertinent to text than some of the other sections.

If you hover with your cursor over the boxes with the various different A’s, you will see previews of what your text would look like with each of these options.

Next to these A’s you’ll see Text Fill, Text Outline and Text Effects. This last one, Text Effects, is an option that was not available in any previous version of MS Word. When you click on it, you will get this dropdown menu:

You can either browse all of these options by hovering over each of these premade effects to see a preview of what they would like when applied to your text, or you can click on options… at the bottom to create your own effect. If you click on the options… button, this is what you get:

From here you can have some fun with each WordArt Style and find something that works for you. 

Let’s check out the Shape Styles section now.

The same principle applies for these options. Just hover with your cursor over the boxes with the various different Abc’s in order to preview what your text would look like with each of these shape style options.

Next to these Abc’s you’ll see Shape Fill, Shape Outline and Shape Effects. Just like with the Word Styles, only the last one, Shape Effects, is an option that was not available in any previous version of MS Word. When you click on it, you will get this dropdown menu:

It should be said that not every one of these effects works with WordArt, some of them only work with other types of graphics. Only the Preset, Shadow and 3-D Rotation work with WordArt.

Just like with the Word Style options, you can either browse all of them by hovering over each of these premade effects to see a preview, or you can click on options… at the bottom to create your own effect. If you click on the options… button, this is what you get:

Mess around with the available effects and find something that looks appealing to you.

These are the new special effects features available in MS Word 2010 for WordArt. Outside of WordArt, however, there are many more options for enriching your documents with more visual elements than have ever been available in previous versions of the Office suite.

David Lazar is a regular blogger at PDF Converter blog. With a background in journalism, he specializes in writing blogs on a variety of topics, including freelancing, careers, writing, technology and new media. 


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