Apply special effects to text with Microsoft Office Word
Updated: March 13, 2007
How-to article
Do you want to make teacher and student documents more engaging by adding eye-catching special effects to text, such as making text shimmer, blink, or shine, emphasizing the beginning of paragraphs, and creating fun vertical layouts of text?
Apply special effects to text in Microsoft Office Word to animate text, insert an eye-catching drop cap, or design vertical WordArt.
Note: Some special effects will show up only when you view the document on the screen, while others will enhance a document when it is printed.
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Lesson information
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Instructional level | | • | Intermediate user | | • | Advanced user |
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School level | | • | Elementary school (Grade 2 and up) | | • | Middle school (11-14 yrs) | | • | High school (14-18 yrs) |
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Curriculum areas | | • | Behavioral and social studies | | • | Language arts | | • | Science | | • | Technology | | • | Work skills |
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Software required | | • | Microsoft Office Word 2002 |
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Objective
Apply text animation, drop cap, and vertical WordArt special effects in Microsoft Office Word to enhance documents. Here's how:
| • | Text animation: Make text shimmer, blink, or sparkle on your screen. Curriculum uses: | • | Emphasize specific vocabulary words in sentences or a story. | | • | Mark parts of speech, such as proper nouns, adjectives, or plurals. | | • | Mark the symbolism or characterizations of the main characters from a book. | | • | Highlight the main events from a story. | | • | Emphasize descriptions of an animal in a report. | | • | Mark the parts of the digestive system. | | • | Emphasize the main causes of the Revolutionary War. |
Animate text 1. | Select the words in your document that you want to animate. | 2. | On the Format menu, select Font. In the Font dialog box, select the Text Effects tab. 
| 3. | Try out some of the special effects, such as Blinking Background, Las Vegas Lights, Marching Black Ants, Shimmer, and Sparkle Text. | 4. | When you're finished experimenting, click OK. Notice that the special effects are now applied to the selected text. |
Note: These special effects appear only on the computer screen; they will not print out. |
| • | Drop cap: Enlarge the first letter of a paragraph to make it stand out. 
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Curriculum uses: | • | Start a story with a drop cap. | | • | Make the first letter of a newsletter article stand out. | | • | Start a report with a fancy drop cap. |
Apply drop-cap special effect to text 1. | Select the first letter of a paragraph, and then on the Format menu, select Drop Cap. 
| 2. | In the Drop Cap dialog box, select either Dropped or In margin. | 3. | If you want this letter to stand out even more, choose a different font for it. | 4. | In the Lines to drop text box, decide how many lines you want this letter to take up, for example, 3. | 5. | In the Distance from text box, determine how far away you want the drop cap to be from the regular text, and then click OK. |
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| • | Vertical WordArt: Arrange WordArt in a vertical layout instead of horizontal. Vertical WordArt samples: 
Curriculum uses: | • | Place the name of your school down the left edge of the page. | | • | Place a department name down the side of the page. | | • | Type the name of the subject of a report on the report cover. | | • | Type the name of a poem or story down the side of a page. |
Apply Vertical WordArt to text 1. | Insert a new piece of WordArt into your document. To do this, on the Insert menu, click Picture, and then click WordArt. | 2. | Select a vertical layout from the five choices on the right, and then click OK. 
| 3. | Type the bullet that you would like to appear vertically. Select the font that you would like to use, and then click OK. | 4. | If you want to drag your vertical WordArt anywhere on the page, you need to turn on bullet wrapping from the WordArt toolbar. Try Square or In Front of bullet. (If the WordArt toolbar is not visible when you click your new WordArt, select Toolbars, and then WordArt from the View menu.) |
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Innovative teaching
