- [Instructor] Text boxes are a way of adding pieces of text
to a document so they can be moved and manipulated
similarly to pictures.
I'm going to scroll in my document to the spot
where I want to add the text box.
I'll click to place my cursor there.
Then I'll go to the insert ribbon and I'm looking
for the text box option.
When I click on that, it opens this menu.
And Windows users will see a selection
of pre-made text box designs that they can choose from.
Mac users do not have those options,
but that's totally fine because I want to start
with the option to draw a text box anyway,
and that's going to work on both Mac and Windows.
So I'll select that.
And then I can just drag to draw the box on my page.
So to start, this is just a box with a text cursor inside.
So I'm going to just type in some placeholder text for now.
Now, you probably are going to want to move or resize this box.
So I want you to see if you click outside of the box,
the box is not selected.
If you click on the box, it is selected.
And then you've got these anchor points
around the edges of the box.
So to resize it, you can grab one of those anchor points,
click and hold and drag to resize it.
And to move it, you need to place your mouse cursor
on one of the edges,
wait until you see it change to this cross,
then you can grab it and drag it
and move it wherever you want.
So, of course, you can just type anything you want
in this box, but what I want to do
is cut and paste some text that I already have
in the document.
So I've got that text right here.
I'm going to select it.
Then in the home ribbon, I'll choose the cut option.
And then I'll go into the box and I'll delete
the placeholder text I have there.
Then in the home ribbon, I'll choose paste.
And now I've got the text I want in that box.
So we can move this around or resize it,
but we've also got some more formatting options,
and this works a lot like formatting a picture.
When the box is selected,
you'll see there is a special formatting ribbon available
for it in your ribbons, up at the top.
And when you select that,
you've got all kinds of adjustments you can make
to that text box.
I want to start with the option for wrapping text,
but I do want to point out
if your screen layout is different,
you might not see that wrap text menu.
You might have to click where it says arrange,
and then you can get to that wrap text menu.
But I'm just going to enlarge the window
so we can go straight to that menu.
And this is where you can set how this
is going to interact with the other text on your page.
You can see it's currently set so that it's going to sit
in front of the other text on the page.
I want to set it so that the other text on the page
will wrap squarely around it.
So I'll select that.
And now you can see, I can move that box
and all of the other text on the page
will just wrap around all four sides.
And I think it looks pretty good right there.
Next, I want to take a look at the options
in this ribbon for the outline and the fill.
Now, we can see if we click away from the text box,
it does already have a very thin black outline,
but if we select it again and go to this outline menu,
you could change the color of the outline
and you can also change the thickness of that outline.
So if we go to this weight option
and set this to a thicker weight,
now we have a thicker outline.
Next, I want to go to this fill menu.
You might want to choose a solid color,
or you can go back to that menu.
You could choose a picture as the background for your box,
or you could choose a gradient color,
which I think looks pretty nice,
so I'm going to choose one of these gradients.
Or you can go back to that same menu.
You can go to gradient,
then go to more gradients,
where you can get more granular control
of how that gradient looks.
But I'm just going to close that for now
and I'll stick with the background fill that we have here.
Now, I do think this looks pretty good,
except for the one obvious problem,
the color of the text and the color of the background
are just too close.
Fortunately, we can adjust the look of the actual text
here in the same ribbon.
So first, I'm going to select all of the text in this box,
and you can see I have these options here.
I could change the text fill.
So if I change it to white,
I think that looks pretty good.
You could also set an outline color for your text.
I don't really want to do that here.
There are some special visual effects here,
and there are some pre-made styles,
and you might find one of these looks pretty nice.
I don't actually want to do that from here,
so I'm going to click the undo button here
in the quick access toolbar.
And of course, since this is text inside of the text box,
we can also just go over to the home ribbon
and use some of the text formatting options here.
So maybe I want to select this first line.
I could make it bold. I could underline it.
I could even use
some of the paragraph alignment options here
and I could center it in that text box.
So now I have this box of text that I can format
completely separately from everything else in my document,
allowing me to design special layouts.