An exciting new feature to Office 2010 is the screen clipping tool, called Screenshot. The screen clipping tool lets you take a picture of your screen, also called a screen capture. The screen clipping feature first appeared with OneNote, and is now available in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote with the new and improved Office 2010 features.

You can find the Screenshot tool on the Insert tab in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or OneNote. When you activate this command, and you have any other application windows open, the Screenshot tool assumes you want to take a picture of one of the currently opened windows, so it displays the windows in a gallery of screenshots. To use one, just choose the one you want to insert into the current document.

The other option is to take a new screenshot by dragging over the area of the screen you want to capture. This technique lets you control exactly what to include in the screen clipping.

Once you grab a clipping, it is immediately inserted into the current document window wherever you have clicked in the file.

Hidden among the Microsoft Office 2010 Tools folder is a little gem of an organizer tool called, appropriately, Microsoft Clip Organizer. This stand-alone mini-application helps organize drawings, photos, sounds, videos, and other media clips as well as access clips from the Microsoft Office Web site. In previous renditions of Office, you could access the Organizer through the Clip Art pane; now you must go through the Windows All Programs menu.

Microsoft Clip Organizer is its own separate window complete with a menu and toolbar, a Collection List pane listing all the folders and categories of clip art, and a viewing pane for displaying the clips. By its very nature, the Clip Organizer keeps track of your clip art collections, including photographs, sound clips, video clips, and of course, clip art graphics. You can also use the Organizer's feature to access more clips online, organize clips into unique categories by moving and copying them into different categories and collections, or the Organizer's Search tool to look for specific clips in your collections.

Like other files and folders stored on your computer, the Organizer lists clip art collections in hierarchical order, with folders and subfolders, and categories you can expand and collapse to change the view.

One of the best parts of using Microsoft clip art is being able to look for more clip art online. As an Office 2010 user, you are entitled to use any of the clip art from Microsoft's huge online clip art collection. With a connection to the Internet, the clip art is always at your disposal.

The first time you use the Office.com site to download clips, you may be asked to accept a service agreement. Once you pass this hurdle, you can download as many clips as you want.

Clip art is added to the Microsoft Clip Organizer, one of the Office 2010 stand-alone programs that installs with the suite. To learn more about this, see the previous task. With the clip art safely added to your computer, you can use it with any of the applications that utilize clip art. You can use the Clip Art pane to search for your downloaded clips and add them directly to your documents.

New to Office 2010, you can edit an image, such as a photo, and remove the background. This technique basically cuts out the subject of the image and allows you to use a different background behind the image, which opens a variety of possibilities. You might use the image with closely wrapped text, or place the image over a solid color background that matches your document's color scheme.

Normally you have to use a program like Photoshop to remove a background. With the new Background Removal feature, you can designate areas of the background to remove or use the marquee to cover what areas you want to keep. When you first open the feature, a magenta color overlays the image.

Background Removal tries very hard to figure out what part of the image you want to keep and what background to remove. The Background Removal tool includes a tab of tools you can use to fine-tune the procedure. You can then choose to keep your changes to the image, or discard them entirely. After editing an image, you can save it as a new picture file and reuse it again later.

The Background Removal feature is available in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook.

You can use the Office Artistic Effects to turn a regular picture into something eye-catching. For example, you can turn a photo into an instant chalk sketch or a negative glow with edges. If you are looking for ways to bring attention to pictures in your document, workbook, or presentation, artistic effects may be just the technique for you.

With Live Preview on, you can preview what each artistic effect looks like before you actually apply it. Live Preview is turned on by default, but if yours is not you can click the File tab, click Options, and then click the Enable Live Preview check box in the General tab to turn it on again.

With over 20 different effects you can try, it is not likely that you will run out of ideas anytime soon. However, if you do, you can also fine-tune each effect to create a new look. The Format Picture dialog box offers a tab for Artistic Effects with several tools to change settings pertaining to a particular effect, such as transparency, smoothness, and so on. Try experimenting with the options to see what kind of new looks you can create.

Here is a technique often overlooked by Office users — the ability to change the order of elements in a document. You can create layers or stacks of graphic objects in your document, such as placing a shape on top of a photo, or moving a clip art object underneath a WordArt object. Using the ordering commands, you can control which object appears in which position in a stack. You can use this technique to create logos, letterhead, and other graphical elements.

You can apply ordering controls to text boxes, clip art, shapes, pictures, WordArt, charts, and just about any other graphic object you place in a document, workbook, presentation, or publication.

Ordering objects boils down to sending an object to the back of the stack, or to the front of the stack, or positioning it somewhere in between. To place an object at the very front, choose Bring to Front. To simply move it up in the stacking order, choose Bring Forward. To place an object at the very back, choose Send to Back. To move it backwards in the stacking order, choose Send Backward. The steps in this task show a shape object being moved through the stack of other objects.

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If you are having trouble selecting objects on-screen, open the Selection and Visibility pane. Click the Selection Pane button on the Format tab for the Drawing Tools or Picture Tools. This opens the pane on the right side of the window, and you can click which item you want to select and then apply an ordering command. You can also use the Bring Forward (

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You can use the alignment tools on the Drawing Tools or Picture Tools tab to align shapes and other graphic elements in a document. You can align selected objects to the left, right, or center, or you can align them vertically to the top, middle, or bottom of the page. You can also choose to distribute the objects evenly across the page or up and down the page. To find all these controls, simply click the Align button and choose an alignment.

You can group several objects together in a document and perform formatting tasks to every item in the group at the same time. For example, perhaps you have a shape, a WordArt object, and a text box in your document that you want to reposition. Rather than move each object individually, you can place them all in a group and move them at the same time.

You can also group items to apply formatting, such as align them all at once, or add the same border to each one. You can even group items simply to create one large object in a document. For example, you might group three or four shapes and turn them into a graphic object you can reuse again later.

The key to grouping is learning to select multiple objects at the same time. You can do this by pressing Shift or Ctrl while clicking all the items to include in a group.

You can find grouping commands on the Format tab for Drawing Tools or Picture Tools on the Ribbon. Once you group objects, you can easily ungroup them again later to return them to their individual states.

Do you ever have trouble finding just the right piece of clip art to illustrate your work? Maybe you can find one that is close to meeting your requirements, but it needs to be another color or lose a portion of the background. Fret no more. You can use the Ungroup command to customize a piece of clip art to meet your needs.

You can convert a clip art object into a Microsoft Office drawing object and make changes to the image's individual elements. To do this, you must apply the Ungroup command. Once you ungroup the various parts that comprise a clip art drawing, you can edit those parts to create a different piece of clip art. For example, you can change a shape's fill color, or remove an outline or delete an entire background behind the main subject.

After editing individual elements of the clip art, you can regroup the parts again to create a single object.

Note that this technique does not work for all clip art objects!

You can add captions to any graphics you insert into your Word or Publisher documents. Captions can really help explain what you are illustrating, such as a photo, a chart, or a graph. For a particularly long file, like a Word document, captions can help you keep track of figures by numbering them, such as Figure 1, Figure 2, or Table 1, Table 2.

The captioning feature offers you several preset captions to use, such as Figure, Equation, or Table. You can also enter your own label. You do not have to use a label. You can turn this feature off if you want.

Captions normally appear directly below the image. The captioning feature lets you control the location of your captions. For example, you might want to place a caption above a picture.

You can type your caption directly into the Caption dialog box and then apply it to the selected image.

You can use the Office 2010 WordArt feature to create custom text designs, such as arched text for a logo or shaded text for a document title. For example, if you create a company logo in a Word document using a WordArt object, you can convert the logo into an image file that you can use with another program, such as a page-layout application, or with another Microsoft Office program.

Although you cannot save a WordArt object as its own file type in Word or Excel, you can use another easy avenue to convert the object into an image format that non-Office programs can use. By using the Windows Paint program, an application that installs with Windows, you can copy the WordArt object and paste it into the Paint window, and then save the object as a graphic file. Popular graphic file formats include bitmap, GIF, JPEG, and PNG.

The real trick to this technique is remembering to crop the graphic in the Paint window so you end up with a properly sized graphic object.

A watermark is a recognizable background image or words that appear faded yet still discernable behind the document's content. Apart from the realm of computers, watermarks are typically security features found on paper money, passports, and postage stamps, usually as a way to verify authentication and prevent counterfeiting. Over in the world of business and computer-generated documents, watermarks are commonly used in official letters, a way to brand output, or as Web page backgrounds.

In this task, you learn how to insert a graphic as a watermark. In Word, the Watermark feature is set up to insert text watermarks. You can use a text watermark to mark a document as a copy, an original, confidential, or urgent. Going the extra step of using a graphic takes a little more planning. For example, you might want to use a company logo as a watermark, or a branding logo.

When using an image as a watermark, legibility is the key issue. You want to make sure the document's text is clearly readable over the image. As you create a custom watermark in Word, you can control the scale of the image. The Washout setting is selected by default, to create the faded appearance for the background.

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You can also create your own text watermarks rather than choose from the preset list. To do so, open the Printed Watermark dialog box and click the Text Watermark option (

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You can simulate a watermark in Excel by assigning a picture as a workbook background. To do this, you must first make sure the image you want to use is set to the degree of transparency needed so your data is clearly legible on top of the image. You can use a photo-editing application to adjust the image transparency before using it in Excel. Once you have an image ready, click the Page Layout tab on the Ribbon, and then click the Background button. The Sheet Background dialog box opens, where you can navigate to the file you want to use.

If you plan on inserting graphic elements into your file, it is a good idea to learn the various ways in which you can wrap text around the graphic. Text wrapping refers to the way in which text flows around a graphic object in the document. Whether you insert a photograph, clip art, or a basic shape, you can use the text wrapping tools to assure just the right fit. You can find text wrapping tools in Word and Publisher.

As far as wrapping options go, you can choose from a variety of settings. By default, text is set up to wrap an object inline, which simply means the object sits on the same horizontal line as the text. Alas, this setting is a bit limiting and the object sits there like a sore thumb without blending into the document. Instead, try choosing one of these text wrapping settings: Square, Tight, Through, Top and Bottom, Behind Text, or In Front of Text.

Thankfully, the names are pretty accurate as to how the text wrap is going to appear in the document. If you choose Tight wrapping, for example, the document text flows fairly closely to and around the object. Try them all to see what works best for your document.

When you install Microsoft Office, it includes several extra applications stored in the Microsoft Office 2010 Tools folder. One of these extra apps is Microsoft Picture Manager, a simple image-editing program that allows you to manage, edit, and share your digital picture files. The program provides you with a centralized location for viewing all picture files stored on your computer.

You can easily find pictures located in other folders on your computer and view them in the Picture Manager window. The program includes several useful tools for editing your pictures, such as cropping, reducing red eye, adjusting brightness and contrast, and resizing. After you edit your pictures, you can share them with others. Picture Manager includes tools for e-mailing pictures or placing them in a SharePoint Picture Library to share with a workgroup.

You can also send pictures directly to an Office program. You can insert a selected image directly into an open file, or add the image to a new file.

If you make changes to a picture, such as resizing or cropping, Picture Manager keeps track of your unsaved edits and keeps them in the Unsaved Edits folder.

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You can find a bevy of editing tools in the Edit Pictures pane. You can edit the brightness and contrast of an image, adjust the color, crop a picture, rotate and flip a picture, remove red eye, resize a picture, and compress the picture file size. Do not forget to save the changes before closing Microsoft Picture Manager. You can also save a copy of the picture and keep the original intact. Just click the File menu and click Save As.

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To remove a picture you no longer want, select it and click the Delete button (