By: Lindsay Lamb
Have you ever gotten frustrated adding an image into your report, especially in word? The text boxes don’t line up quite right, images jump around, things get anchored in a weird place, you can’t resize anything… and you want to throw your computer against the wall. Well, maybe that’s just me.
Although I have been writing reports for nearly a decade, it was only recently that I learned this cool trick that would have saved me lots of grief and frustration.
Recently, Andrea and I were working in tandem on a report. We each took a section, set a timer to draft it out, and got busy. I was in the zone. Chugging away, racing to get as much done as I possibly could before the timer went off. I decided not to get bogged down in adding figures, it was just too frustrating for me to add them in word. Instead, I created a couple of figures in excel, and added placeholders for them in word. I would deal with them later. I glanced over at what Andrea was doing. Cool and confident, Andrea was two pages in AND HAD FIGURES!!! She saw my eyes widen and said,
“Hey, have I ever shown you this cool way to add figures in Word?”
“No…”
“You just add a three-row table in word and drop the figure in. Make the top row the title, the middle row the image, and the bottom row for the note or source.”
My jaw dropped.
GENIUS!!!
Here is a step-by-step process for inserting a figure in word (or PowerPoint) using a table.
STEP 1: Insert a 3-row table
(Insert->Table)
Note: You can add columns if you are inserting a series of figures that all have the same title; the columns can be the same width and the rows can be the same height, ensuring that your figures are all the same size.
STEP 2: Drop in your figure, add your title, and your source/note.
Place the figure in the second row, the caption in the top row, and the note in the bottom row.
I just copy and pasted my figure from excel into word. I can easily make changes to the figure in excel and it will update in word. I can also make minor edits to the figure in word (like color or font) as well.
Now these three elements – title, figure, and note – are all grouped together. You can change the size of the figure as one unit, move the figure around without throwing off anchoring. Text in the remainder of the report can wrap around the figure in multiple ways, depending on the report layout.
Wait! Before you move on to your next figure, there is one final step. Obviously, you do not want the table borders to show up, but it is helpful to see the borders while you are laying out your report and copy editing. Let’s get rid of them.
STEP 3: Make the table border invisible for the final report, but visible while editing.
Select table, then right click and choose “No Border”
Now you’re done!
Here’s the final result:
A similar process exists in Microsoft publisher, but that software is not available on a Mac, and since many of us are working from home, we might not have access to our regular office setup. Also, sometimes, you just need to use word because not everyone has publisher.
In any case, if you are using publisher, you can insert an image placeholder and add text boxes for the title and note/source and then group those elements together. The difficulty with that process, however, is that you have to resize the figure in excel prior to inserting it into publisher or your figure might get wonky. Translation: you need to know the overall layout of your report so that you know how much space you have for your image prior to inserting it into your document. In word, the image resizes appropriately with the rest of the elements in the table.
Hope this trick helps you as much as it helped me!