How to Add Images and Color to Your Holiday Letters

Word Tricks Makes Letters Merrier (updated for ‘the Ribbon’)

It is the Holiday time of year. (Is it just me, or did 2013 pass-by rather quickly?) Each year at this time, I post this article which demonstrates a few tricks to make your Season’s Greetings letters more joyous, and your documents more visually interesting. Many of you already know the A-B-C basics of manipulating fonts and formatting, and so this will be review.. and loyal readers may remember this one..

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 programs. 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 Calibri at 11 “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 Word’s 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 Home tab. 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. (I should have matched the greens… but ran out of time.. sorry.)

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Today’s quote: How ’bout some more Longfellow? “The life of a man consists not in seeing visions and in dreaming dreams, but in active charity and in willing service.” ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Copyright 2007-2013 © “Tech Paul” (Paul Eckstrom). All Rights Reserved.

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All we really have, in the end, are our stories. Make yours great ones. Ones to be proud of.

Consumer Electronics Show 2013

Unfortunately, nobody sponsored a free ride to ole’ Tech Paul to the CES 2013.. so to find out what the future of tech is going to look like, I turn to CNet.

CNET brings you complete CES 2013 coverage ~

Join us at the world’s largest tech show where CNET editors will scour the showroom floor for the hottest new tech around!

With 90 people on the ground in Vegas, if it happens at CES, it’s happening on CNET. Our comprehensive CES special coverage brings you every moment of the show.CES 2013 features more than 3,000 tech companies from around the world unveiling the latest devices and services. From impressive-looking TVs to strange, bone-conducting headphones to giant robotic spiders, we’ve got it all here.

CNET’s Next Big Thing: The Connected Revolution CNET’s Next Big Thing SuperSession is one of the most popular events at CES, and in 2013, hear what big names in tech and business are saying about the post-mobile revolution. Read more Qualcomm’s keynote at 2013 CES Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs takes the stage to talk up the mobile revolution. View video Always On’s live torture test at CES Want to see if the iPad can survive liquid nitrogen? Or how about dropping the Surface tablet from a ladder? Molly Wood and Brian Tong torture a slew of gadgets at CES 2013. View video Adriana Huffington showcases her new app CNET’s Dan Farber interviews Huffington Post’s Ariana Huffington about her new app called GPS for the Soul, a heath app to combat stress and promote a healthy lifestyle. View video CNET’s Sharon Vaknin slays the Mondo Robot Spider Check out EatArt’s 50-foot mechanical snake and watch Sharon take the reins on the Mondo robotic spider. View video

Don’t miss your chance to win* a Samsung Galaxy Tablet Find the “#” for a chance to win* a tablet! *No purchase necessary. See official rules for details. LL Cool J drops in on the CNET stage at CES 2013 CNET’s Brian Tong interviews LL Cool J on his new Liquid MyConnect Studio App, a real-time music collaboration tool for a mobile device. View video The LG Smart Refrigerator know what you have, knows what you need Donald Bell plays around with the LG Smart Refrigerator that will remind you that you need more beer. View video 50 Cent comes back to CES 2013 with SMS Audio Brian Tong talks to 50 Cent about the growth of SMS Audio and his favorite headphones. View video

I hope there’s an item there (or two) that interests. (Maybe the Galaxy Tab Sweepstakes?)

Today’s quote: “The obvious and fair solution to the housework problem is to let men do the housework for, say, the next six thousand years, to even things up. The trouble is that men, over the years, have developed an inflated notion of the importance of everything they do, so that before long they would turn housework into just as much of a charade as business is now. They would hire secretaries and buy computers and fly off to housework conferences in Bermuda, but they’d never clean anything.” ~ Dave Barry

Copyright 2007-2013 © “Tech Paul” (Paul Eckstrom). All Rights Reserved.

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>> Folks, don’t miss an article! To get Tech – for Everyone articles delivered to your e-mail Inbox, click here, or to subscribe in your RSS reader, click here. <<

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All we really have, in the end, are our stories.
Make yours great ones. Ones to be proud of.