Designing A Label Template – Finding Word’s Design Tools & Features

How to find design tools in Word suitable for designing label templates.

For many people, Word is a simple way to create the documents they need on a day to day basis, and they use the same tools and features over and over again with few, if any, difficulties. When, however, they need to use Word for something a little different – say, to design and print their own labels – it can become quite a frustrating territory to navigate, especially when they need to find tools that they have never needed to use before.

Over the years, Word has been adapted and updated to make it easier to use and sleeker in design; unfortunately, some people struggle with the layout and navigation of Word, which can make it difficult for them to find the tools they need (and make simple tasks much harder and more time consuming to complete).

While Word has added functions to help overcome these issues (such as the introduction in Word 2016 of the “Tell me what you want to do” tool, which provides a shortlist of options based on the information you enter), there are a few basic tips that can help save you plenty of time when it comes to designing a label template in Word.

• All the tools that you can use to make changes to your Word document (and any items that you add to it) are contained in the “RIBBON” at the top of the page.
• The tools are grouped into “TABS”, which are displayed above the ribbon.
• There are two types of tabs:
  “DEFAULT TABS”: these tabs are always visible and include the Home, Insert, Design, Layout, References, Mailings, Review, and View tabs.
  “FORMAT TABS”: these tabs contain formatting tools that relate to different objects (e.g. images, text boxes, shapes, tables etc) and are only visible when you have selected an object or objects. They include the Drawing Tools, Picture Tools, Table Tools Design, and Table Tools Layout tabs.
• The Picture Tools tab contains tools to edit images and the Drawing Tools tab can be used to edit WordArt, text boxes, and shapes.
• Built-in templates are accessed through the “Labels” tool in the “Mailings” tab.
• You can amend the page margins of your template using the “Custom Margins” tool, listed under “Margins” in the “Layout” tab.
• To add an item to your template you can either use the options listed under the “Insert” tab or use the copy and paste tools listed under the “Home” tab to import items from an external source.
• Word templates are basically tables where the cells in the table represent the layout of a set of labels on an A4 sheet (including any gaps around or between the labels); to make any amendments to the table, you can use the tools listed under the “Table Tools Design” and “Table Tools Layout” tab.
• If you cannot see the outline of the table (meaning your Word template appears blank) you have Table Gridlines turned OFF; to turn them on, left click in the centre of the page to bring up the Table Tools Layout tab and then click on the “View Gridlines” button on the left hand side of the ribbon.