Get rid of boring Word docs!

In the beautiful brochures – which are made by the communication department of Howest in the Adobe suite – text is sometimes surrounded by coloured frames. It is one of the ingredients for a fresh Howest look.

Luckily, this types of style elements are not exclusive to the Adobe suite. You can perfectly integrate them in MS Word to spice up long, dull documents. Though the method of working in Word may differ from the one in Adobe and is not always so obvious.

Take the coloured frames for example, you may think – just as I thought – to integrate them via the feature Text Box on the tab Insert. This is okay for normal text, but I noticed that text boxes do not work for numbering like in multilevel styles and footnotes. If you put such “special” text in a text box, the numbering of the list is no longer correct.

A solution to integrate this element without losing the numbering? Insert a
Rectangle (tab Insert > shapes) instead of a Text Box, give it a lively colour and put it behind the text via the feature Send Backward > Send Behind Text on the contextual tab Drawing Tools.

The document above is made in Word. Besides little style elements like the coloured frames, the page number in little triangles, the text balloons, … the document catch the eye by using a lot of colour and contrast!

By integrating these little style elements you are one step closer to a fun and readable document!

How to number your heading styles

To set the numbering of your headings, you might think you have to modify the numbering IN the headings of the style gallery on the home tab.

Though styles is not the place to be if you have more than one heading, because then you need to set up a list with different levels, and not just a basic numbered list.

The only way to do this – as far as I know – is by the function ‘Multilevel List’ on the home tab. Select a heading and click on ‘Define new multilevel list…’ in the drop-down menu. Then click on ‘more’. Now you can link each level to a style, or more specifically, to a heading style.
So link level 1 to heading 1, level 2 to heading 2, leaving 3 to heading 3,…

Besides that, you can adjust the Number format.

• Do not forget to restart each list after the previous heading/level, for example: the numbering of heading 3 has to restart after heading 2.
• The more levels you have, the larger the text indent has to be so that all the text of the headings is aligned neatly underneath each other, like the first example below.
  

The headings in the styles gallery should now be numbered but you can turn the numbering on or off by clicking on the function ‘Numbering’ on the home tab.

Based on MS Office 2013