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2.13: Borders and Shading

  • Page ID
    14295
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    Borders add interest and emphasis to your document. Borders make attractive frames for text, pictures, tables, or entire pages. You can customize borders to complement your document by experimenting with Word’s built-in styles. To add a border to text, select the text. On the Home tab, click the small down arrow next to the Borders button, and choose an option OR choose the Borders and Shading option to open the Borders and Shading dialog window.

    Borders and Shading
    Borders and Shading

    Make sure the Apply to box is set to Text, which adds a border around lines of text, or Paragraph, which creates a border that outlines the paragraph. Also make sure that a choice, like Box, is selected under the Setting option.

    Shading is the color or artistic design you use as background for a paragraph. By shading words or paragraphs in Word, you can create visual interest in a document. The Highlight command offers a more limited color selection, which you can use when you review or edit a document to highlight specific text. The shading fill, style, and color can be defined from the Shading tab of the Borders and Shading window. To apply shading to a part of a document, select the data, then click the arrow next to Shading, and under Theme Colors, click the color you want to shade your selection.

    Shading
    Shading palette

    Borders can also be added to pictures. Just select the picture, then choose a pre-formatted border from the Picture Styles gallery off of the Picture Tools Format tab.

    Picture borders
    Picture styles gallery

    To remove the paragraph borders and/or shading, choose the None option in the Borders and Shading window. In the Shading tab choose the No Color item in the Fill section, and choose the Clear style in the Patterns section.

    Practice 2: The Solar System – Part 2

    1. Open the recently edited data file The Solar System1.docx from your data files.
    2. Find and Replace all occurrences of the word “mainly” with the word “primarily”. (Word should find three results that need changing)
    3. Select the four paragraphs of text starting with Mercury and concluding with Mars. Create a bulleted list. Repeat these steps using the paragraphs starting with Jupiter through Neptune.
    4. In the paragraph following The Sun, replace 9000 degrees with 9000° using the symbol. (Character code 00B0) Repeat this step in the Venus paragraph by replacing 465 degrees with 465°.
    Sun
    The Sun
    1. Insert an Online Picture of the sun in the blank paragraph above The Inner Planets. Resize the photo to be 1” x 2”. (Don’t forget to unmark the Lock Aspect Ratio checkbox in the Layout window)
    2. Apply the Square Wrap Text format to the picture, and position the image to the right margin.
    3. Apply WordArt to the text “The Solar System” using the Orange, Accent 2 fill. Apply the Top and Bottom Wrap Text format to the WordArt.
    4. Apply a hyperlink to the text Mars to a web page using the URL: http://nineplanets.org/mars
    5. Use the [F12] keyboard equivalent to save the file with a new name (add the digit 2 after System) to your computer’s hard drive.

    This page titled 2.13: Borders and Shading is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Marcus Lacher (Minnesota Libraries Publishing Project) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.