I want to create a fancy heading in a Word Doc with our company na

[Jeff Ingman]

We're recruiters. Before we send a Word resume to a client we add a nicely
formatted heading "paragraph" at the top with our company name and byline.
The heading "paragraph" has grey shading in the background.

It looks good except the grey background degrades if the resume is printed
and later copied or scanned.

I'd like to come up with a different background... not the grey -- lines...
dots... whatever will reproduce cleanly.

I don't want to create a graphic file because this means an extra file
attachment when we email resumes. Whatever effects I use must show up in Word.

Any suggerstions?

 

[Jay Freedman]

Try experimenting with this: With the cursor in the paragraph, go to
Format > Borders and Shading > Shading. Pull down the Style dropdown
(in the Patterns section) and scroll down below the shades of grey.
Toward the bottom are assorted horizontal, vertical, and diagonal
lines and grids. Below that, you can select colors for the lines.

Try the various selections to see how they behave in copying and
scanning.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the
newsgroup so all may benefit.

 

[Jeff Ingman]

Thanks Jay... I had not seen the additional options in the style box.

This will help me come up with something attractive.

 

[Tony Jollans]

Any suggerstions?

Don't do it.

It is precisely because of this type of behaviour that I never send my CV in
Word format to any recruitment agencies.

I have been on both sides of this. I have never seen my CV improved by an
agency, and I reject out-of-hand CVs I receive which give any indication of
having been changed by an agency.

That said, there is nothing you can do to stop degradation during scanning
(or even, often, just printing) and any background at all is probably best
avoided. I have never seen a background look good on a CV.

 

[Jeff Ingman]

Tony... if you're a Word expert... we might not improve your resume by
reformatting it... but we have to add our company/contact info before
submitting it to a client.

Resumes get passed around an office and we can't let them to forget where a
resume came from. (Our work doesn't end when we send a resume.) We work VERY
hard on behalf of our candidates and must be paid for our efforts.

And I assure you 90% of the resumes we reformat (no word changes) look and
read more easily after we reformat them.

We place civil engineers and most are not Word experts like you.

jeff

 

[Tony Jollans]

Hi Jeff,

This is way off topic for this newsgroup but I consider a CV (or resumé)
as an example of someone's work as well as their life story, and as a
recipient of a CV, I like to be able to see how the applicant has laid it
out (technically how they've used Word is not the issue, just the end
result). In my experience a messy CV reflects a messy worker (I have mostly
done recruitment of mainframe programmers - and not for over five years now)
and too often I have seen messy CVs as a result of agency editing with the
primary concern appearing to be to promote the agency, although you make a
fair point that different individual recipients may need to know where a CV
came from.

One of the big problems I see is that editing of CVs tends to be a levelling
process. Poor CVs are improved and good ones made poorer. This makes the
selection of interview candidates harder. I'm sure you have the best
intentions at heart and it may be that what you do genuinely works in favour
of all parties involved, but that has not been my experience. I have no
problem with cover pages being added, or printing (or formatting for
printing) on headed paper (and would be happy to change my own CV to
accomodate any letterhead - but would insist on doing it myself or, at the
very least having a veto on the end result. What I take issue with is any
change to the body of the document - whether it affects content or just
structure.

I'll get off my soapbox now! Recruitment of civil engineers is outside my
experience (although my Dad was one), and life would be dull if we were all
the same.

I will repeat what I said earlier that backgrounds rarely improve documents,
part of the reason being what has brought you here in the first place.

 

[Jeff Ingman]

I agree... this is off topic for this newsgroup.

Briefly... if we had a candidate appear who was poorly dressed we'd help him
find a suit. (not really but you get the idea)

Same with resumes. If we can help a candidate improve the appearance of his
resume we will do so... and in our opinion our style of formatting usually
does make most engineer's resumes more readable.

In other words... we don't get paid unless we help the candidate get the job
and we do everything ethical to do so.

Re backgrounds... we're only talking about a very light grey background in a
1 inch header at the top of the resume... where we add our company name.

jeff

 

[JoAnn Paules [MVP]]

My resume doesn't have a spare inch at the top. But since I am scheduled for
orientation on Monday, I reckon that doesn't matter.

--

JoAnn Paules
MVP Microsoft [Publisher]