Word 97—Ease of Use

Drawing

Picture Objects

In the past, if you wanted a movable picture you had to encapsulate it in a frame or a textbox. Now, using Office Art’s picture objects, Word automatically gives you all the flexibility required for picture manipulation:

• Text Wrapping - no matter what your picture’s shape is, you can always wrap text around it.
• Drag and drop pictures - now you easily place pictures anywhere in your document, including inline with text.
• Modify Z order - Send Behind Text to create a background graphic or watermark effect.
• Group pictures - now you can easily group pictures and drawing objects together so you can manage and manipulate multiple pictures simultaneously.

New Textboxes

Word 97 replaces frames with new textboxes. Word still supports frames which means any older documents coming into Word 97 will not lose any frame information and you can still manipulate frames in Word 97. However, textboxes are the newly recommended options for manipulating a range of text since they offer more capabilities than frames in the following areas:

• Office Art objects - Since textboxes are implemented as drawing objects in Office Art, they offer the full set of Office Art capabilities such as shadows, 3D effects, fills, backgrounds, rotation, sizing, cropping.
• Linked textboxes - textboxes allow you to do multiple stories across multiple pages which is very common in newspapers, newsletters and magazine articles.

Computers make very fast, very accurate mistakes.