Lesson no 13 = Creating Lines And Arrows In Word

Creating Lines And Arrows In Word

Microsoft Word gives you the ability to create many shapes in your documents, and some of the more useful ones are lines and arrows. You can use these to good effect to help illustrate your points. For example, you might like to add some descriptive text for an image and then "point" to the image.

To create a line, click Insert > Shapes. As you can see, there is a huge selection of shapes we can draw.

The options we need are positioned close to the top of the panel in the Lines category. They allow us to draw straight lines, stright lines with corners, curved lines and closed polygons. We can also draw lines that have arrows at one or both ends, too.

To draw a line, either with or without and arrow, click on a tool and then click and drag in your document. Clicking once for the start of the line and again for the end has the same effect.

Adjusting The Line

You can select a line by clicking on it, and once selected you can move it in any direction by using the arrow keys on your keyboard. To delet the line, just press the delete key or backspace. Suppose you want to resize the line though, either to lengthen or shorten it. You can do that too. First of all select the line and then hover the mouse over one end. When the cursor changes to a "plus sign" (without arrows on it) you can click and drag to move that end.

When the line is selected, you might also notice that the Drawing Tools contextual tab appears in the ribbon. We won't cover what effects you can apply to the line in this tutorial, but there are plenty worth investigating by way of some trial and error.