DRAW TAB

The Draw tab is a new addition to Word. As the title suggests, it gives you the means to draw either with the mouse or directly with your finger if you have a touch screen. You can choose the colour and thickness of the line and draw over existing text. You can also select what you have drawn and move it around to a better position. An extra feature is the Ink to Math Convert. When you click on it, a window comes up for you to ‘write’ mathematical expression with the mouse or finger, and it will convert it into text.

DESIGN TAB

The Design tab may not be available in some versions of Word, but this is how it appears in Word 2016. If there is no Design tab, you can still choose and modify specific style formats from the Home tab. On the left side is the Themes menu which gives you a choice of heading theme blocks. Click on any one and you will see the long window – Document Formatting – just to the right of the Themes menu, alter accordingly. You can then choose an overall heading style from that window, which will alter all the heading and text styles on your Home tab’s Styles window. You should also see a change in the Colours menu display icon. The Colours menu is just to the right of the Document Formatting window, and gives you options to vary the colours used in the headings. The next menu is the Fonts, and this again gives you a direct method to change the fonts from many choices.

Paragraph Spacing gives you another way apart from the Paragraph section in the Home tab to change the line spacing in paragraphs but affects the whole document.

Effects allows you to add design themes to Objects in your document. These can be things such as shadows and other visual effects like that discussed under WordArt. There is a lot you can do here but this will not be discussed here.

The Set as Default button means you can set the themes and styles you have applied as the default themes and styles, and these will come up automatically as the styles you get when you open Word. Of course, you can always change themes as before.

The final section of the ribbon on the right relates to Page Background, which are things that affect how the page is presented overall. The three background aspects here are the Watermark, Page Colour, and Page Borders.

WATERMARK

The Watermark menu allows you to place a faint text heading across the background of the pages. You can use one of Word’s option texts or you can create a custom text or place your own picture in the background.

PAGE COLOUR

If you want to ‘pretty up’ your page with a background colour hue, then this menu allows you to do so. You can also create a gradient of colours across or down the page. The option colour chart allows you to preview the result by simply sweeping your mouse arrow across the different colours.

PAGE BORDERS

Clicking on the Page Borders icon brings up the page borders window, which gives you various options for borders around each page, or around a paragraph. You can have lines, multiple lines, patterns and colour added if you wish.