Learning Resources
 

Another concept to become familiar with before you embark on actually inserting drawings is the drawing canvas. This is a frame-like environment that helps you insert and arrange a drawing or drawings in your document; it's especially useful when your drawing consists of several shapes.

The drawing canvas also provides a boundary between your drawing and the rest of your document. By default, the drawing canvas has no border or background, but you can apply formatting to the drawing canvas as you would to any drawing object.

When you insert a drawing, Word places it on the drawing canvas by default. By contrast, the default behavior when you insert a picture is to embed the file into the document without using the drawing canvas. Of course, you can work around this default behavior: If you don't like using the drawing canvas, you can turn it off; if you want to use the drawing canvas to help position pictures, you can place pictures on it (click in the drawing canvas and then insert the picture).

Note    Diagrams (including organization charts) are automatically placed on a type of drawing canvas.

You can use the Drawing Canvas toolbar to change the drawing canvas itself. If the toolbar does not appear automatically when you insert a drawing, just right-click the canvas and select Show Drawing Canvas Toolbar.

That's all the information you need to get going. To begin inserting and positioning graphics on the page, continue to the next lesson.

--Microsoft