Our guide below will show you how to use the tools in Microsoft Word to achieve your curved text.Ħ.5 Additional Reading How to Arch Microsoft Word Text Whether you’re designing a flyer or a newsletter, or anything else that needs to be visually appealing, there are many cases where you might find yourself needing to curve a Word in your document. You can then select the Format tab > Text Effects > Transform > then choose a curved path. You can curve text in Microsoft Word selecting the text, clicking the Insert tab, clicking the WordArt button and choosing an option from the drop down menu. But there are a lot of other elements that can be included in a Word document, including curved words. For example, you might need to know how to curve text in Word if you’re designing a document that would benefit from having that effect.Ī traditional Microsoft Word document, such as one that you might create for school or your job, is rarely more than plain text and maybe a picture or graph. This also means that you can apply WordArt text effects (use the Text Effects tool and then choose Transform) to modify the shape of the text in your text boxes.Even if you’ve been a Microsoft Word user for a long time, there are certain formatting options or objects that you need, but might not know where to find. If you wish to insert a WordArt object that has simple text formatting requirements, you can do it using a text box, then applying the desired additional minor WordArt formatting options, rather than starting with the fancier text options provided by WordArt. You can easily add text within a text box and then format that text using WordArt styles. The benefit of this "merging" of how WordArt and text boxes are formatted within Word is that the two objects are almost interchangeable. The only thing different is formatting settings such as size and color. As you click the other object, you should see virtually no difference in the Format tab they are the same. Click one of the objects and make sure the Shape Format tab of the ribbon is displayed. You can see this easily if you insert a WordArt object and a text box close to each other in your document. In Word 2010 and later versions the two objects actually share the same Shape Format tab. The difference is that WordArt objects started with different formatting defaults than did text boxes. If you examined these tabs closely (which might necessitate screen captures so you could see them side-by-side), you'd see that they have the same formatting options. Both objects, when selected, displayed a Format tab on the ribbon. You could see this most clearly by looking at the formatting options available for a WordArt object and a text box. Instead, it became an object similar to other objects (such as a text box) that was handled internally by Word. In older, menu versions of Word (up through Word 2003), WordArt was handled as a graphic object, external to Word itself, that could be easily inserted in the document.īeginning in Word 2007, though, WordArt became more integrated into Word it was no longer an external graphic object. Historically, that is the case, primarily because of the way that WordArt was handled. At first blush, it may seem that these two features are not really related to each other. Word has been providing the capabilities to use both text boxes and WordArt for quite some time.