Add charts, graphics, diagrams and more to Word documents

When putting together long, complicated documents, you often need all the help you can get. A document that contains photos, charts, graphics, diagrams, tables and bulleted lists, for example, can take an age to put together, but Microsoft Word can help.

Thanks to Building Blocks and Quick Parts – different names for the same feature – it’s possible to call on galleries of pre-designed common document components and simply drop them into your document. This workshop applies to Word 2007 and 2010.

Step 1
Launch Word and then open an existing document or create a new one. For the purposes of this workshop, we’ve created a dummy document for a fishing club that includes plenty of text, some photos, a bulleted list of rules and a chart. We’ve also added headings and drop capitals, but now we want to spruce it up further still with the minimum of effort, which is where Building Blocks and Quick Parts come in. We’ve zoomed out here so you can see a couple of pages of the document.

Step 2
The first thing to do is add a footer. Click the Insert tab on the ribbon, find the Header & Footer panel and click Footer. From the dropdown menu, choose the Alphabet footer by clicking on it. Next, check the Ribbon to make sure Word hasn’t put a tick next to the ‘Different First Page’ settings in the Options panel. If it has, click to remove the tick. (You may have to insert the footer again after this; it’s an odd little Word quirk.) Click where it says ‘Type text’ and replace it with your own descriptive footer.

Step 3
Now double-click anywhere in the main text to close the footer area and then scroll through the document - the new footer appears on every page. Notice too that it’s greyed out, indicating that it’s no longer editable. Double-click in the footer area to open it for editing again. Next, click the Insert tab and choose Header from the Header & Footer panel and select the Annual header. Word drops it into position at the top of each page.