How To Create Conditional Images In Microsoft Word

You can put Conditional Images in Microsoft Word documents, so that when a user performs one action, an image appears. This saves you having to create two pieces of text for each condition.

Why Create Conditional Images In Microsoft Word

Let’s say you have a User Guide and you want to show different images depending on what the user does. You could create another chapter and show what happens if/when the user performs one action. Or you could put conditional images into the Microsoft Word file so different images appear depending on what the user does.

Sound complicated? It’s not really.

Using Macros to Create Conditional Images

Here’s what to do:

1. Create a Style for each condition.
2. Create a macro that hides or shows that conditions on need.
3. When you insert the graphic, style it by Condition.

For example, we will create UserGuideBasic and UserGuideAdvanced and style them accordingly:

• Make two paragraph styles: UGB and UGV.
• Make two macros (one to hide UGB, the other to hide UGV).
• Make a button for each.
• Enter the graphic and style the paragraph to UGB.
• Click the button to hide UGV and make it disappear.

Next Steps

You can use Macros to all type of weird and wonderful things with your User Guides and other technical documents.

Let me know what other Macro tricks you know.