Technical Writing – How to Design Borders Around Pages of a Microsoft Word Document Template (6)?
A technical writer needs to know the MS Word inside out. Why? Because Microsoft Word is the world’s most used text and page layout software. The chances are, in one technical writing job assignment or another, you’ll be asked to use MS Word to design a document template or edit an existing one. So you’d better know all the wonderful things you can do with it to enhance your technical writing career.
Let’s look closely at MS Word’s powerful tool that can draw all kinds of borders around the pages of your document template.
1) Open your MS Word template.
2) Click and insert your cursor inside a paragraph, on a specific page.
3) Select Format > Borders and Shading from your MS Word main menu to display the Borders and Shading dialog box. The Borders tab would be selected by default.
4) Click and select the Page Border tab. This selection adds a new “Art” drop-down list to the middle pane, and change the options available from the all-important “Apply to” drop-down list.
5) Pay attention to the “Apply to” drop-down list on the lower-right corner. Your selection will determine whether your page border choices will be applied only to the Whole Document; This Section (the section to which the current page belongs); This Section [but] First Page Only; This Section [but] All Except the First Page. There is a lot of flexibility there.
COOL TRICK : If you are wondering where one section ends and the other one starts, turn on your formatting marks by pressing the “Show/Hide P” button on your toolbar. Or, select the Tools > Options from the main menu from to reveal the Options windows. Then select the View tab and select the All check-box in the Formatting Marks group of check-boxes. I suggest you use the Show/Hide button to toggle the Section Marks on and off. It is much easier to do it that way.
We are not finished… You can do a lot with MS Word page borders as I’ll demonstrate in the next and seventh article of this series on designing MS Word technical documentation templates.
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