Watermarking a Printed Document
The "watermarking" process most Office users have enjoyed with Word Processing does not transfer to Excel printing. The background image that shows up in the printing of a Word document will only show on the screen in an Excel document. What's a body to do? The answer is to not quit, but look to other Excel options and see if you can accomplish what you want another way.
Consider the useful watermark of 'DRAFT'. Quite often an Excel document is prepared for review by several different people. It becomes strategic to make sure the developmental versions do not get confused with the final version - hense the use of the 'DRAFT' watermark is an excellent management tool. But how do you get DRAFT on a printed document? It's not too difficult using Word Art.
Let's take this one step at a time.
First let's get a sample spreadsheet to illustrate the steps. This simple arithmetic example will suffice for our needs.
Once you have a sample spreadsheet to work from, you are ready to begin.
Launch the WordArt Wizard by clicking on
Insert + Picture + WordArt.
This launches the familar WordArt Wizard. Simply select a style and enter the word DRAFT.
In order to make your text stand out, you should bump the font size to as large as it will take.
In this case, we have bumped it up to 80 points.
Click on OK to accept the settings you have chosen.
This is going to look really bad to begin with, but don't dispair - we are not finished yet.
Note the WordArt hides some of the cell content. You have to understand what is going on in order to 'fix' the problem.
The individual letters are made up of a border and a closed area that has been filled with a color (in this case white) which has the effect of hiding your Excel content.
The solution: edit your WordArt by removing the "fill".
The how: note the WordArt floating Toolbar.
You can edit your text by clicking on the proper tool in the Toolbar.
This should open up the different formatting options. You should change the Color Fill options to No Fill.
When you finish, click on OK to accept this setting.
It is a good idea to check the progress of your work with the Print Preview option.
This is pretty good. You can see the Excel content, but the outline of the letters (border) is pretty dark. There has to be a way to "soften" the outline so it doesn't dominate the document when it is printed.
With that lead-in, you know there is a way.
Return to the WordArt Toolbar and look at the Line Color option.
In this example, we have selected the Gray color which will replace the solid black (Automatic) default choice when you first created the WordArt image.
When you have the color selected (something much lighter than Black), simply click on OK to confirm your selection.
If you re-visit the Print Preview, you will see the effect of your Line Color selection.
The Final Version
