Word Help needed - anyway to set a background image to not print???

valve90210 · 2 Mar 2012 at 13:42

Basically exactly as per the thread title.

I am trying to find an easy way to have a backgrond image inserted into a word document (in the header) and have it display on screen but not print out, does anyone know if this is possible?

I've tried googling and not found anything conclusive or simple enough for the people that would need to be doing it here at work!!

We use word 2003 and 2007 if that makes any difference.

The reason I want to find a way is so one office can set letters in a wordfile that has the letter head in the background, they can then create a pdf of this with te background included.

Then when they come to print to the photocopier they can print to the headed paper we have without the heading template printing...

kierenharrold · 2 Mar 2012 at 13:56

Im not 100% sure but i think if you highlight the text you can print only what is highlighted under an option called 'print selected only' or 'selected'... or something like that.

mistercrabb · 2 Mar 2012 at 18:12

I thought that if you set a document background through background colour->fill effect->image then it wouldn't print.

Makhaira · 2 Mar 2012 at 18:30

How about just setting the document margins so that they can't write over the header?

valve90210 · 5 Mar 2012 at 10:38

Makhaira said:
How about just setting the document margins so that they can't write over the header?

That's not the problem, the problem is that I want the header to appear on pdfs they create but when they come to print it for mailing out, they will be printing onto pre-printed headed paper so I don't want the background image of the headed paper printing onto the already printed headed paper.

gord · 5 Mar 2012 at 11:20

mistercrabb said:
I thought that if you set a document background through background colour->fill effect->image then it wouldn't print.

This should solve your problem.

If you insert an image into the header it will print. What you want to do is insert the image as part of the background, which has the default option of not printed.

I'm not sure if when saving or printing as a PDF it will show the background by default, but there should be a tick box to include it.

valve90210 · 5 Mar 2012 at 13:30

I did give that a whirl but I couldn't get the image to display correctly when set as the background, it was much too large and I couldn't find a way to get it to fit the page? This was despit the image being A4 sized....

maybe I needed to change the resolution???

gord · 5 Mar 2012 at 14:24

You'll have to play around with the image size. I've just tried it with one of our A4 letterheads and the image was out of place as you said. But if you use a smaller image it tiles it.

mistercrabb · 5 Mar 2012 at 14:49

I just played around with it and it fitted horizontally when the image was 800px wide. I reckon it needs to be about 1100px high to not tile vertically.
I hate word