Subtitles of the Movie

Using WordArt. While we are talking about multimedia and some of these special effects that you might want to use, I do want to also bring up the issue of WordArt. Now WordArt is simply a little application that is available within most Office applications. It's been around for some time and it's available here in PowerPoint, as well, and you may find it useful from time to time because it sort of lends itself to presentation formats. Now what WordArt does is it basically allows you to type words or very short little phrases and apply all kinds of interesting style options to them. It's different than typing something and applying your standard styles as you shall see here in just a moment, and the WordArt option is available on the drawing toolbar which is available by default at the bottom of your screen. It will probably look like this; you can drag it around as you want and WordArt is the little insert WordArt icon that you see here. It looks like a little sideways "A" and that is where you get WordArt. As a reminder, if you don't see the drawing toolbar, can't find it, click view toolbars and then click drawing to select it. And one other little trick, if any time you can't find a toolbar, just right-click any of the menus, and there you'll have the toolbar options just click them when you want, that is sort of a quick work-around. I am going to click insert WordArt and what I am going to get is a WordArt gallery, and it's going to give me all of these different kinds of styles of WordArt that you see here. What I want to do is find the one that I particularly like and the one that I particularly want to use within my presentation. So I am going to look around through these and I am just going to choose sort of a basic one like you see here. I am going to click OK, now what it's going to give me is a text box and if I just click the backspace key on my keyboard, I can type whatever text I want. I can also adjust the size, the bold and italic, and even sort of change the font, and you might want to leave these the way they are if you are wanting to sort of look like what you saw on the previous screen, but you can certainly adjust them, and I am going to click OK and there is my WordArt. Now at his point, I can treat it like any other object; I can stretch it out, move it around, make it larger, I am going to move it up a bit, whatever I want to do. Remember my little yellow diamond here? I can stretch it in and make some changes that way. I can also rotate. So your basic things that you can do with any kind of clip art, I can do with WordArt, as you see here. When you insert WordArt you also get this little dialog box here that can actually have some really helpful options, and I'll run through these with you. First of all, I can insert WordArt, which is the same thing that you see here. Edit text is going to take me right back to this dialog box so I can change my text with in the WordArt. Remember that WordArt is not like a regular text that you type, I can't click inside of this and change the text. I've got to go back to this edit text window then I have the option to go back to the WordArt gallery and choose a different style feature if I want. I have changed it. Then I have the option for formatting, which basically allows me to change the color schemes, fill options, that sort of thing. I can take a look at size positioning; for the most part you won't really need this unless you want to change the color. There it is and I am going to go back and change that, make it something a little brighter. Alright, and now I have WordArt shape and this is the one that you are going to like. If you click this, what you're going to get is a drop-down menu of different shapes and, if you click a shape, your WordArt is going to change to look like that shape. Here we go, you see that one, there is one, there is another, and so if you just kind of go to, and click through these you will see a lot of different options that you'll probably like. Then we have an option for WordArt same letter heights and this basically kind of controls the WordArt picture so that it looks more in line. You may need this or you may not. You can choose WordArt vertical text so it's going to change your text to be vertical; just click it again, they go back. Paragraph alignment, and then finally character spacing. If you click this you have what's selected, but you can choose anything from very tight, as you see here they are almost touching, to loose, let's put some more space between them-- very loose, and then you can do custom, I am just going to go back to normal. Now if you are working with WordArt, it's important to remember that you can use some other features as well. If you go down to your drawing toolbar you can include shadow styles, line styles, there is a 3D option I am going to put on it. Now I've completely changed the way it looked. So again, it's important to experiment and use the WordArt in a way that looks great and is easy to view. Remember as you are working with it, to always click the slide show button so that you can see exactly how it's going to look to your audience members. As you might guess, WordArt works great on title pages and similar pages like that but, again, always go back and take a close look at it, think about your colors, look at how it's interacting with your backgrounds and make sure it's helpful, it's visible, and it just absolutely looks great on the screen. Since you have a lot of options, that shouldn't be too difficult and I think you will find WordArt to be really helpful from time to time.