Graphics can make or break your publication or Web site. The right graphic draws people's attention to your main points and jazzes up your document. The wrong graphic creates a lot of noise and the wrong impression, or can be so slow to download that the user just gives up and goes elsewhere. Do you know which graphic format you want to use on your Web site or how to create a great background? The February Focus offers ideas on how best to use graphics with Office 2000. Read on.

Formatting graphics: some basic information

Whether you want to create a document that will be printed or one that will be posted to a Web site, you need to know how your graphics will appear and how they will change when printed or saved in HTML. Read Issues with graphics used on Web pages in Office and When to use specific graphics formats in Office to find out how your graphics might change in appearance, size, and sharpness or quality.

Editing and positioning graphics

Sometimes when you insert a picture into your Word document it can seem to float off the page or be cut off because of where your picture aligns with the text on the page. Learn how to prevent this problem in Position pictures in Word 2000.

As you build your Web site, you can use Office 2000 to change graphics, for example by resizing them, cropping them into different shapes, or adding or removing images and text. Learn how in Edit Web graphics with Office.

In Clip Gallery, you will find a wealth of graphic images, sounds, and video clips that you can edit or import directly into your document or Web site. Inserting a Clip Gallery clip in Office and Stacking images in Word 2000, Excel 2000, and PowerPoint 2000 explain ways to make Clip Gallery content fit your specific needs.

Creating Web backgrounds and collages

Learn how to use your company logo or other art as a background on your Web pages in Using a picture as a Web background in Office. Microsoft PhotoDraw® 2000 version 2 provides many additional ways to manipulate and combine graphics. Find out more in Create a photo collage in PhotoDraw 2000 version 2.

Web graphics: some technical considerations

Using graphics on Web pages obviously introduces some technical considerations that don't arise with plain text. For example, users who turn off graphics in their Web browser, or who are visually impaired and use screen readers, still need to know the content of your graphics. Provide alt text to describe graphics verbally in Office explains how to add alternative, or "alt," text to each of your graphics.

Since a graphics file used on the Web is linked to by the Web page, if the link breaks because of an incorrect path or missing art, the user will see only the infamous red "X " to denote the missing graphic. Read Avoid missing graphics when you create a Web page in Office to learn how to prevent this from happening, and how to test for it.

It is also important to keep the download time of your Web page as short as possible, and a good way to do this is by using thumbnails of graphics rather than loading the full-size graphic initially. Create thumbnails in FrontPage 2000 and PhotoDraw 2000 version 2 explains how to use thumbnails on your Web pages.