How to Improve a Word document? Format Image in MS Word

Working with images or picture is essential for a variety of tasks. You may have to make a school assignment, present an illustrative report to your boss or make a project and a lot of such things. Well, you have a variety of ways to format image in MS Word. Let’s explore the ‘Format’ menu in detail to add attractive, illustrative and interesting images in a Word document.

In this article you will learn to crop and image, crop and image by giving it a specific shape and applying border to an image in your document. Let’s do it!

Format Image in MS Word-Crop an image

This is the most common thing you want to do if you need to extract a portion of image, which is not useful as a whole. Cropping in Word can be done by deleting all the non-essential parts of an image which is already inserted in a Word document. Original image will not be affected by the process of cropping. So here are the steps to crop an image in MS Word.

Select the image you want to crop in your document

If your Word document contains an image that needs cropping then select it first. A selected image will have small boxes on the edges and corners. These are called the ‘Handles’.

Click the ‘Format’ Menu

Observe that the ‘Format’ menu appears only when you have already selected an image to format. Now click this Menu from Menu bar and you will be ready to crop your image

Click Crop option and drag crop handles to crop the image

Now you have to click the crop option from the ‘Format’ options presented to you. When you do this you will see Crop handles on all sides and corners of the selected image. Click, Hold and Drag these handles to select the portion of image you want to keep. After you are done with the cropping, click anywhere in the document to preserve the cropped image

Cropping an Image in a specific shape

If you want to crop your image according to a specific shape, MS Word gives you the option. Follow these steps to do this Format Image in MS word for cropping.

Select the image you want to shape  crop

In your Word document select the image that needs shape cropping. A selected image will show small boxes called handles on the edges and corners of image.

From the ‘Format’ Menu select ‘Picture  Shape’ option

Click on the ‘Format’ menu and click on the ‘Picture Shape’ Ooption as visible in the image below

Select the Picture Shape of your Choice

Now select any shape you want to apply on your image. Once you select it you can see that your image will be cropped according to the shape you have selected.

After finishing cropping you can resize this cropped image according to your need by simply holding and dragging the image handles. You can see the change in the size of the image.

Apply Border to an image

In a flow of words in a Word document a suitable border defines the image and enhances its impact and overall look of your document’s presentation. Here are the steps to format Image in MS word to add border.

Select the image you want to apply border to

Select the image in your Word that needs a border.

From the ‘Format’ Menu select ‘Picture Border’ option

Click on the ‘Format’ menu and click on the ‘Picture Border ‘ option as shown in the image below.

Select Color, Weight and Dashes

Now you can select the border color, style of border by choosing the dashes and weight according to your desire as shown in the image below

You can select ‘More lines’ from the ‘Weight’ option to design an image border of your liking from the format picture dialog box that appears now.

Closing words

There are a score of things that you can do to format Image in MS word. In the next article we will see such options offered to improve the appearance of your document.