It is the Holiday time of year. (Is it just me, or did 2008 pass-by rather quickly?) Today I'm going to demonstrate some tricks to make your Season's Greetings letters more joyous, and your docs more visually interesting.
Tip of the day: Add some festivity to your documents with fonts and color. MS Word has a lot of features and options built into it that allows for some very creative elements to be added to your correspondence, and is not at all limited to cold, "professional" documents. I'll use Word for this demo, but you can do this in most text editors, and e-mail composers.
Today I'm going to use a hypothetical holiday greeting letter to show how to add some fun. By default, Word sets the font to Times New Roman at 12 "points" in height. I have typed in my text, to get things started, and will demonstrate using this letter's "opener". As it is a header, I have "centered" the text. 
As you can see, this font and text does not quite convey the joy and cheer and "best wishes" I am hoping to express. In fact, this may as well say, "Memo from Giganti Corp." Yawn! So first thing I'm going to do is 'tweak' the font style, and make some word bigger (louder), to express a less formal tone. 
I "highlighted" Season's Greetings, and used the Font drop-down arrow and selected a cursive font-- Lucida Handwriting (explore Words various fonts, and find the one you like best). I set the point size to 36. I repeated the process on the second sentence, but set the type smaller.. only 18. I think you'll agree, this is much more "friendly" than the default's look. But this is just not Festive enough! Let's use some color and improve things some more. 
I have again "highlighted" season's greetings to select this font, and then clicked the Font Color button on the Formatting toolbar (If this is not showing, click here to read how to customize your toolbars). I then clicked on the little red box in the color-picker. Now season's greetings is red. I want to alternate letters in green, so I hold down the Ctrl key and use my mouse to "select" every other letter. 
I didn't really like the greens available on the color-picker, so I clicked on "More Colors".... 
... and selected a green that contrasted nicely with the red-- as the box in the lower right corner shows. This is the result of these steps. 
Much more jolly! But, something's missing... 
Let's add one more thing-- a picture of a candy cane. I went on the Internet and found a Royalty-free graphic (though a piece of Clip Art would do just as nicely) and...
Voila!I could 'go crazy', and get carried away with adding things here... but I hope you will be able to see by this little demonstration -- using only two of Word's functions -- that you are limited only by your own creativity, and that it's easy to personalize and 'spice up' your documents.Copyright 2007-8 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved.![jaanix]()
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