7.4 Images, shapes and page layout

What you'll be able to do

Place pictures that stay next to the text they belong to, because you understand wrapping and anchors. Those two ideas are behind every jumping-image mystery. You will also set up the page itself: margins, orientation and columns.

Before you start

Carry on in the formatting practice document, and have two images of your own ready to place.

The work

1. No documented keyboard shortcut for this — use the menu: insert a picture from Insert → Pictures → This Device. It arrives in line with the text, which means it behaves as one very large character in the sentence. In line is the stable setting. The image moves with its paragraph like any word, and for most documents that is exactly right.
2. Same either way: when text should flow around the image, select it and use the Layout Options button that appears beside it, or Picture Format → Wrap Text. Square wraps the text around the frame. Top and Bottom gives the image a band of its own. Behind and In Front are for deliberate layering only. As soon as wrapping is not In Line, the image is floating, and floating objects have anchors.
3. Same either way: see the anchor before it confuses you. With the formatting marks on (Ctrl+Shift+8), select a floating image and find the small anchor symbol in a nearby margin. A floating image is tied to that paragraph, so when the paragraph moves to the next page, the image goes with it. That is the whole mystery of "my picture jumped": its anchor paragraph moved. Drag the anchor to the paragraph the image truly belongs to, and tick Layout Options → Move with Text.
4. No documented keyboard shortcut for this — use the menu: crop and compress exactly as the PowerPoint module taught. Picture Format → Crop trims to the subject. Picture Format → Compress Pictures, with "Apply only to this picture" unticked, is what you run before a document full of photographs goes anywhere near email.
5. Same either way: put alt text on every image that carries meaning, with no exceptions. Open the context menu (Shift+F10) → View Alt Text, and write one sentence carrying the image's point. Mark decorative images as decorative. This is the accessibility lesson's rule, applied here, where images actually enter documents.
6. No documented keyboard shortcut for this — use the menu: the page itself lives on the Layout tab. Margins are Normal for most work, and Narrow rescues a one-page CV. Orientation is portrait for prose, and landscape is a per-section choice the next module teaches. Size should be A4: check it, because US Letter is still the setting in some templates, and Indian printers expect A4. Columns gives newsletter-style text. Column text fills the first column and continues into the next, and Ctrl+Shift+Enter moves to the next column early.

Try it

Place your two images. Put one in line with a paragraph ready for a caption, and wrap the other square beside text. Then find its anchor, move the anchor on purpose, and watch the image follow. Crop and compress both, and write alt text for both. Set margins to Normal and size to A4, and give one section of the practice document two columns.

Check yourself