Simul Blog

How to insert a Watermark in Microsoft Word

When you receive a document from a lawyer, agent, banking institution or even just a colleague and they have a DRAFT or CONFIDENTIAL watermark plastered across the background you quickly get the message that this document is, as stated, confidential.

Watermarking is a great way to label your document, in an obvious way so that any reader understands what type of file they are looking at.

Adding DRAFT to your document is a simple way to let the reader know they are not looking at the final version just yet and things may change.

Inserting a watermark to your Microsoft Word document is easier than you think. In this article we will show you how to add a watermark to word in just 5 quick steps.

Inserting a Watermark onto your Microsoft Word Document

  1. Open Word
  2. Find and click the Design tab
  1. Press Watermark
  1. Find the Text box
  2. Type desired word, in this example it is DRAFT into the text box
  1. Select your font type, colour, size and orientation.
  2. Click OK

The DRAFT watermark has now been added to each page of your document.

Looking for a better way to collaborate in Microsoft Word?

Collaborating in Word can be tricky.

It’s safe to say 99% of us have experienced the gut reaching moment when you realise you just saved over an old version by accident, you had every intention of clicking ‘save as’ but you were too quick and your brain jumped straight to ‘save’. Poof, your colleague’s old version is gone, replaced by your file.

It was a mistake and you’re sure there is a way to recover it, frantically googling ‘how to recover a saved over word document’ hoping Microsoft has built-in some feature to restore the old version, without losing your new one.

If you haven’t accidentally saved over a file before, you may have opened your colleague’s file and started to make your suggested changes. You saw a typo, so quickly updated that. Then you realised they had some old stats in there that you had since updated, so you update those. Followed by some formatting, a few words changed to make it all sound more polished and wooala, the updated version is ready to go.

Smugly press ‘save as’ rather than ‘save’, you didn’t overwrite the old version but you realise once you press exit that you’d forgotten to turn on tracked changes.

Without tracked changes on, no-one else knows what you changed or updated and there is no way for them to check your changes before they are added to the master file.

Before you go back and start again, this time with tracked changes on quickly google ‘better ways to collaborate in Word’, or take our word for it, there is a better way, and it comes in the form of a tool called Simul Docs.

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Simul Docs was built to make collaborating in Word easy.

Once you are a Simul Docs user, you can either drag and drop or upload your Word document into Simul and continue working as normal from the Simul dashboard – editing, typing and making changes (its similar to working in Word Online, or Google Docs. It’s still the same Word file, just living online). Or if you’d prefer to continue using the desktop Word, just click ‘Open in Word’ from the Simul dashboard and the document will pop up in you Word itself.

Either way, all of the amazing features we are about to show you will work in Simul or on your desktop once you’ve got Simul on your team.

Simul knows that when you are collaborating, tracking all changes is important. Therefore, when you open any version of your document and start to make changes Simul will track them, track changes are automatically on, every time you open the file.

It’s unlikely that you will ever want to save over your colleague’s file either, so once you make a change to the document Simul will automatically save your updated document as a new version. You can continue making as many changes (all tracked!), updated or edits as you please. Once you have finished, save or exit and Simul has everything stored you.

Next time you open Simul Docs to review the document, you’ll see a versions list sitting on your dashboard. Here you can neatly see each version of your document, organised in numerical order and who made changes in or owns each version.

You can use the versions list to refer back to old versions with ease, each saved version will show you the changes made in that version and who made them when.

You can even compare two old versions if you like, to see what happened between them. Or, if two of your co-workers accidentally open the document at the same time and make changes, leaving you with two different versions of the same file Simul will flag this, and then offer you the option to accept/decline each author’s changes before the tool merges the documents together so you can continue collaborating with ease.

With tracked changes automatically on, version control handled, easy merging and so much more.

Simul Docs is the collaboration tool you’ve been waiting for.

Get Started For Free

See how Simul can help you with a 14 day free trial, and paid plans start at just $15 per month.