Word comes with so many graphics features, “Microsoft Word and Picture 2008” might have been a better name for the program. More and more often, your skill using pictures, drawings, tables, and charts make your document the one that is read and understood.
The Insert menu has a long list of graphic objects you can pop onto a Word page: clip art, scans from a digital camera or scanner, drawing objects called AutoShapes, and so on. Because this Insert menu is available in most of the Office programs, its graphic commands are described in Chapter 20.
Using graphics in Word entails only a few special pieces of knowledge. First, you can specify how the existing word processor text interacts with each graphic—whether it wraps around or passes over or under the image. (That’s the purpose of the Text Wrap commands described earlier in this chapter.)
Second, it’s important to understand that you can paste a graphic in either of two ways:
As an inline graphic, one that sits right in the text. If you delete or insert text in preceding sentences, the graphic moves backward or forward as though it’s just another typed character.
As a page graphic, one that’s married to a particular spot on the page. If you add or delete text, nothing happens to the graphic; it remains where you inserted or pasted it.
Note
Page graphics don’t appear in Draft view or Outline view. To see them, you have to switch into Print Layout view, Web Layout view, Publishing Layout view, or the print preview.
The distinction between inline and page graphics has been a source of confusion since Word 1. And Microsoft continues to fiddle with the design of the controls that let you specify which is which.
In Word 2008, the scheme is simple, as long as you understand the technical difference between the two kinds of graphics that Word handles.
Drawing objects always begin life as page graphics, floating on the page with no relationship to your text. (Drawing objects are graphics that you make yourself, right in Word, using the tools on the Drawing toolbar. They include AutoShapes, text boxes, arrows, rectangles, freehand lines, and so on.)
Pictures begin life as inline graphics, embedded right in a line of text (unless you’ve changed your preference for inserting pictures in Preferences → Edit). (Pictures are images you import from other sources; they include Word’s own Clip Art gallery, pictures from your iPhoto library, Photoshop files, and the like.)
Tip
See Chapter 19 for more detail on the distinction Word makes between drawing objects and pictures.
Just because drawings start out floating on the page and pictures start out hooked into your text doesn’t mean they have to stay that way. It’s easy enough to convert an inline graphic into a page graphic or vice versa. Select the graphic and open the Formatting Palette’s Wrapping pane. Click the Style pop-up menu and choose In Line with Text to make it an in-line graphic. To turn it into a page graphic, choose any of the other wrapping styles in the menu.
If you prefer the dialog-box route, double-click the graphic, click the Layout tab in the Format dialog box, and click Advanced to access the same wrapping options (see Figure 4-13).
Word displays the graphic in its new environment: your former inline graphic is now floating on the page, or your former page graphic is now just another typed character.
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