Word 2010: Reveal Picture Style formatting?

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In Photoshop, I can select a picture and see all the formatting that has been applied – bevel, shadow, color, etc. Is there a way to view applied formatting in Word 2010? I would like to select a photo and view its formatting in a Style pane, or have the formatting revealed in a dialog box.

Thanks!

~Val in chilly IL

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Val,

Welcome to the Lounge!

In Word 2010, if you select the picture, this should activate a Picture Tools tab on the Ribbon, containing a whole bunch of functions for applying formatting to the picture.

To see most (all?) of the settings in one place, locate the little square ‘dialog launcher’ box that is at the bottom right corner of the Picture Styles group on the Picture Tools tab – this will display the Format Picture dialog, where the settings are aggregated (you can also simply right-click on the Picture and select ‘Format Picture’ from the bottom of the context menu):

27188-Word2010FormatPictureDialog
Gary

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Hi, Gary. I’ve actually been through that entire dialog and couldn’t really find what I wanted. I’m interested in revealing the Picture Style (from the Picture Styles group on the Picture Tools > Format ribbon) to determine the currently-applied style. As far as I can see, there is no indication as to an applied style – no box, or bolding, on the selected style. Makes it tough to validate a document that is supposed to have a certain style (for a class I teach). If you think of any other approach, I’m all ears!

~Val in chilly IL

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Hi again,

I’d never played around with the Picture Styles gallery, but now that you mention it, that feature leaves a lot to be desired. For one thing, the items there don’t seem to be interactive in the sense that if you apply one of them to a picture, there’s no reflection up in the Ribbon as to which Picture Style you’ve chosen.

And there’s a glaring lack (unless I’m missing it?) of a “No Picture Style” setting – which probably should be first in the list. There is a ‘Reset Picture’ button in the Adjust group just to the left, but that resets all properties of the picture, which may not be what you want to do if you’ve already applied all the formatting you wanted to a picture, and then after that experimented with applying a Picture Style.

And lastly, the Picture Style don’t show up in the Format Picture dialog, as you point out.

Seems like a poor implementation of the feature, especially for something that takes up so much space on the Ribbon. (By the way, it looks like it’s the same in Word 2007.)

On a positive note, overall Office 2010 does provide a lot more photo/image editing tools than in any earlier version of Office.

Gary in chilly NY

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Well, Gary, looks like we’ve both been introduced to a new feature. Thanks for taking the time to poke around and at least validate my understanding of this. Hope it’s warming up out east. Today is in the 30s; feels balmy almost!

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I’m only easing into Word 2010 from many years of using Word 2003 and earlier. I have yet to explore the picture options, but I’ve always set up styles for images in my custom templates. Create a new paragraph style — say “Photos” — and use it for a paragraph containing only a picture. The style can be modified to manage spacing, borders, keeps, alignment, etc.

I often have layouts that need images to be floating left or right, so I can use the Frame format to manage this — and base each style on my default Photos style (i.e. PhotoL & PhotoR). I’ll be interested in seeing if Word 2010 adds any capability to what has always proven to be a very useful technique for my work.

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