How to Give Word documents a professional look with Drop Caps

I

f you look at the opening line of text in some magazines and newspaper articles, you’ll find that the often start with an extra-large first letter called a drop cap. You can use this in your own documents to give them a professional look.

But a drop cap is not created by just increasing the font size. Increasing just the font size would give you mere a big letter towering above the first line. Adding a drop cap is extremely easy in Word 2007. Here is what you need to do to add a drop cap.

• Position the cursor anywhere in the paragraph.
• On the menu, select Insert and in the text section click on Drop Cap.
• Select ‘Dropped’.

That’s it. You will find that the first letter of the paragraph is now converted to a drop cap. After inserting it, you can select Drop Cap Options on the same menu where you can select the font, which can be different to the font used in the rest of the paragraph, the number of lines to drop and the distance from the text. You can also resize the drop cap by dragging the handles that appear on the box around the drop cap.