Brainstorming in your office may make you think of white boards and easel paper covered in scribbles, but there's a more portable and changeable way to get your ideas onto paper. When you create a storyboard for an upcoming marketing effort, financial plan or product change, you get to map out the entire idea process from start to finish. Storyboards let you see your ideas linearly with benchmarks along the way, and when you make them in Microsoft Word, you can edit them, keep them for reference and even share them with your colleagues as digital files.
Step 1
Start Word and open the document in which you want to create a storyboard.
Video of the Day
Step 2
Click the "Page Layout" tab, click the "Orientation" button and choose "Landscape." Click the "View" tab and choose "One Page" so you can see the entire Word document on your screen.
Step 3
Click the "Insert" tab, click the "Text Box" button and choose the first option, "Simple Text Box." When Word inserts the text box onto the page, drag it into the top left area, making sure not to drag the text box off the edge of the document page.
Step 4
Click a corner of the text box and drag it until it is your preferred storyboard square size. Keep in mind that each square in the storyboard must be the same size and will need to fit each "idea."
Step 5
Click the text box and press "Ctrl-C" to copy it. Click into the white space of the Word page and press the "Ctrl-V" to paste the square. Drag it next to the first, leaving a slight bit of white space between the two.
Step 6
Press "Ctrl-V" again to paste a third square. Move it to the right of the first. Continue pasting squares, creating additional rows, until the page is full.
Step 7
Click into the first square on the storyboard. Type over the placeholder Word text with the title of the storyboard, your company's name or your preferred storyboard starting text. To format the text, highlight it, click the "Home" tab and use the menu items in the Font section of the ribbon.
Step 8
Click into the second square on the first line of the storyboard. Add the first line of the storyboard scenario, which may be a character speaking, a narration or a description of the product.
Step 9
Continue to fill in the text of the storyboard squares. Add one line, idea or general description of the action to take place per square.
Step 10
Replace the placeholder text with an image by clicking the "Insert" tab, clicking the "Picture" button, browsing to an image on your network and double-clicking it. Drag the picture until it is inside that square. This is also the way to add your company logo, such as into the last square on the storyboard. Adjust the image size by pressing the "Shift" key while clicking a corner of the image and dragging it.
Step 11
Add other images to the storyboard by clicking "Insert" and "Clip Art." Browse the search field for a term related to that part of the storyboard, then double-click a resulting image and drag it into the square.
Step 12
Click "File," click "Save As," enter a title for the storyboard document into the "File name" field, set where you want to save the file on your network or computer (if necessary) and click the "Save" button.
Video of the Day