The Text Wrapping button on the Picture toolbar controls how your image meshes with the text in your document. You have several choices really, from choosing to stick the picture in your text like a big character to having a ghostly image float behind your text.
To set text-wrapping and image-floating options, click the image once to select it and then click the Text Wrapping button on the Picture toolbar. A drop-down menu of several text-wrapping options appears, as shown in Figure 1.
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Figure 1: The Text Wrapping button's menu. |
Here are some general thoughts on the wrapping options:
- The In Line With Text option is the normal way text "wraps" around an image, meaning "no wrap." The image is treated like a giant character in line with other text in your document.
- The Behind Text and In Front of Text modes make the image float either behind or in front of your text. Behind your text, the image appears as part of the "paper" with the text printed over it. In front of your text, the image floats on top your text like a photograph dropped on the paper. In either mode, the picture can freely be moved anywhere on the page; just drag it with the mouse.
- The Tight item wraps text closely around your image, which is the closest this option gets to true desktop publishing.
- The Edit Wrap Points item works just like the Tight item. However, the image appears in the document with dozens of tiny handles on it. In a dramatic effort to waste serious time, you can drag each handle to adjust how the text wraps around your image. The easy way? Just select the Tight option and let Word do the work.
- The other options wrap text around the image in various shapes and methods, as shown on the menu. In these modes, the image can freely move around the document.
 | Try them all! Seriously, go through the menu and see how each option affects your image. (You may need to move the image around in your text to see how things change.) One of the options is bound to make your text and graphics appear they way you want them to. |
When everything is perfect (or as near as can be expected), click the mouse back in the text to continue editing. (You may need to return to the picture later if you overedit your text, but not if you remember to add your pictures last.)
Putting images in front of or behind each other
The graphics images in your document live on various "layers." Don't bother looking for the layers. Don't bother peeling the screen. The layers show up only when you put more than one image on a single page and when you've set the wrapping options for each image to something other than In Line With Text (so that the images can be moved freely around the page). When that happens, you may notice that one image appears on top of another. That's because each image is in its own layer.
To send one image in front of or behind another image, right-click the image and choose the Order item from the shortcut menu. That command displays a submenu that lists various options for changing the way the image appears, as shown in Figure 2.
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Figure 2: The Order submenu for putting one image in front of or behind another. |
Choose an item from the menu to move the selected image forward, backward, or all the way to the front or back. Of course, this implies that you have more than one image on the page, which is tending more toward image processing than word processing.
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