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Do you often need to add watermarks to your documents? (Do you even know what a watermark is?) If you don't know and someone tells you that you have to have the word "draft" or "confidential" run across the page, don't worry because this article explains what watermarks are and also shows you how you can create them easily.
What is a Watermark?
A watermark is a pale image or text that is displayed and/or printed behind text in a document. They come in handy because they're not obtrusive to the document text itself, yet they display important information that can't be missed by the reader, such as the fact that the document is confidential or that it's a draft version. As you can see in the image below, you can still clearly read the content of the document through the watermark. But there is also no doubt about the fact that this is a confidential document.
Creating a Watermark
Now let's create a watermark in Microsoft Word. However, you will actually want to create several watermarks. You'll create one for each word you need, such as confidential and draft. Maybe you also require one for Priority or Action? Whatever your needs, create a separate watermark for each document designation.
Now before we begin, know that I'll be creating my watermarks in Word 2003. Those of you using Word 2003 or Word XP will have to do a little extra fussing to get the image to display properly. Those of you using versions older than Word XP (2002) will have a little less work to do. Microsoft changed the way some things work in Word. The result is that those of us using newer versions will need to do a little more resizing adjustments.
Although there are other ways to create a watermark, the method I'm going to show you is best for the ultimate goal of automating the process.
Getting Started
Make sure your Drawing toolbar is turned on by choosing View|Toolbars. Draw out a textbox on a blank page. While the textbox is still selected, right click and choose Format|Textbox. Make sure you set the Line setting on the Color and Lines tab to No Line. Now you need to add Word Art text inside the textbox. With the Textbox still selected, click the Word Art icon on your Drawing Toolbar. (I like the simple one in the second row, second cell, as shown in the image below.)
A dialog box opens with a box to enter your text. Type the word Confidential and change the font if you like. At this point, those of you using Word XP and 2003 start to have fun. The textbox you drew out on the page takes it upon itself to jump to the size of the Word Art. (No, that's not what we want it to do, but who asked us, right?!)
To temporarily get some control back, you need to select just the Word Art, so you can tilt the text on an angle and enlarge it But because the textbox has tightened itself to the image, you have to grab the textbox from the outer edge and drag it out of the way. As you can see, once it's out of the way, you can more easily select the text image and rotate it.
With the Word Art selected, right click and choose Format Word Art from the shortcut menu that appears. In the Size dialog box, set the Rotation setting to -45. This change causes the text to tilt across the page.
More Word "Fun"
And now the Word fun continues! To keep your image from warping into rubber text and getting totally out of control, hold down the Shift key as you pull image handles in the directions you need to get the resizing results you want. In newer versions, the textbox continues to snuggle up to the image with each adjustment. So you have to keep pulling it out to make the needed changes. Those of you using older versions of Word won't have to endlessly fuss with it because the textbox will behave itself.
Once the text is sized to fill the page the way you want it, you need to center the image both horizontally and vertically. Press Ctrl + E to quickly center it horizontally. To center it vertically, you can either add space before the paragraph or cheat and just hit the Enter key to push it down to the middle of the Textbox.
Depending on the type of Word Art you selected, now you need to make the image as light as possible so it doesn't distract from the document text. You want it just dark enough to print and be readable behind the text.
If you select the Word Art image, right-click and choose Format Word Art, you'll notice that there is a Transparency setting in the Color and Line dialog box. You can use this setting to lighten the color if you're using a dark shade.
You may also have to remove a Shadow that has probably been applied by default. You'll find the Shadow icon on the Drawing toolbar. Watermarks generally look best without the shadow on the text, but you may want to experiment.
Once you have it looking the way you want, select the outside Textbox. Your next trick will be to save the entire Textbox as AutoText.
With the Textbox selected, press Alt + F3 to display the AutoText naming dialog box. Name your watermark something obvious like Watermark_Confidential. If you make more watermarks later, you can name them similarly, such as Watermark_Draft, and so on. This way you can easily remember their names, and they will all be organized together in the list.
After saving this first watermark as AutoText, you can go back to this same watermark and modify the Word Art text with wording for the next watermark. Make any necessary resizing adjustments, select the Textbox again and save this one as AutoText with a new name. Continue changing the text until you have saved an AutoText entry for each watermark you need.
Automating Watermark Insertion
Now to put the watermark behind the text, you need to put it in the Header of your document. You can think of it as slipping the watermark under the text. To automate the process, you need to record a macro to insert the watermark. Once you have created a macro, you can quickly add your watermark whenever you want.
Open a new, blank document. Turn on the Macro Recorder by either choosing Tools|Macro|Record New Macro or by double-clicking the REC button at the bottom/middle of your Word window in the status bar. Type a name for the macro. Because you will need to record a new macro for each AutoText watermark you insert, again it helps to name them logically. Change the ending part of the name to match the watermark that will be inserted, such as InsertWatermark_Confidential and InsertWatermark_Draft.
After you type a name for your macro and click OK, Word begins recording your keystrokes. So choose View|Header and Footer. By default your insertion point will be within the Header. Click Insert|AutoText and choose the name of the appropriate watermark. Once the Textbox is inserted into the Header, click Close in the Header/Footer toolbar to close the header. Then press the Stop Recording button on the little Macro toolbar the turn off the Macro recorder.
When you're done recording, you now have several macros that insert appropriate AutoText watermarks into the Header of your document. The watermark text you created is displayed behind your document text. The watermark may be difficult to see if you made it really light, so it may not show up until you print the document or view it within Print Preview.
These macros can now be added to a custom toolbar or menu so you can apply each watermark with a quick click. For more information about adding macros to a toolbar or menu, as well as learning how to share these macros, see this article: Sharing Macros http://pubs.logicalexpressions.com/Pub0009/LPMArticle.asp?ID=166.
Now, for those of you who would like to learn how to make this automation a little more sophisticated by learning how to add a little VBA code and a custom dialog box to enhance the process, check out Automating Watermarks, Part Deux, which will appear in the November issue of Dian Chapman's TechTrax ezine.
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