Drawing a "fancy" line in word 2007

[dhstein]

I'm using word 2007 and I can't find my drawing tool, my format menu, my word
art, etc. I'm tring to create a "fancy" horizontal line and I think if I
could find those menus I could do it. Thanks for any help on this.

 

[grammatim]

Do you mean you just don't know where they've stashed them in Word2007
(WordArt is near the right end of the Insert tab, for instance), or
that they've actually disappeared from your Ribbon?

You can get lots of variants on lines just from the Borders & Shading
panel, which is at the bottom of the drop-down of the last button of
the Paragraph group on the Home tab. (And after you've used it, it's
what that button will call next time, until you choose one of the
other commands from the same list. Or, you can put it on your QAT.)

 

[dhstein]

Thanks. OK I found the Horizontal Line and put 2 lines in - but when I try
to type something between the lines I get a box around a lot of my text and
can't edit. Any ideas? Thanks.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Unfortunately, lines in Word 2007 don't permit quite as much "fanciness" as
previous versions. You can choose the weight and color, but "Line Style" is
not available for simple drawing lines, so you can't have double ones or any
of the other variations available in previous versions. This has been
reported to Microsoft and may be corrected in an update (or at least in the
next version).

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org

 

[dhstein]

Thanks for the response Suzanne. Do you have any advice on the box I get
around my text after I insert a horizontal line from the borders menu?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

What the Borders menu is mainly intended for is (naturally) borders (on text
and tables). I would imagine that you might have clicked on some other
borders option; if you opened the Borders andShading dialog, perhaps you
inadvertently applied a Box border to some of the text? If so, you should be
able to remove it by pressing Ctrl+Q in the paragraph or certainly by
selecting the No Border option on the Borders menu.

I confess, when you asked about "fancy" lines, these horizontal lines in the
Borders dialog didn't even occur to me because in some earlier versions,
once inserted, they could be difficult to remove, so I've avoided them. That
problem, at least, appears to have been solved, and I need to keep those in
mind, as they could be very useful (some of the ones from the Web are quite
amazing).

What I thought you might be referring to was the fact that "Line Style" is
no longer available for ordinary straight lines created with the drawing
tools; this was reported by another user a week or two ago. That setting was
what allowed you to format a line as double, or thick and thin (as you can
the borders in the Borders dialog).

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org