Platting with Word and/or Excel

1. Make a clear, clean letter or legal length copy of your area on a good copy machine. Scan this copy and save it as a .tif file. Note:
.jpg will probably work, but in any event, the scan must be saved as some sort of picture file. I use .tif.
2. Open Word or Excel.
3. If using Word, disable the Drawing Canvas.
1) Tools
2) Options
3) General
4) Uncheck Automatically Create Drawing Canvas When Inserting AutoShapes.
4. Activate the Drawing Toolbar which will place it at the bottom of your screen.
1) View
2) Toolbars
3) Drawing
5. If using Excel, Activate the Lines Toolbar and drag it to the bottom of your screen.
1. Go to the Drawing Toolbar at the bottom of the screen.
2. Click on AutoShapes
3. Go to Lines.
4. Go to the dots at the top of the Lines Menu and it will say Drag to Make This Menu Float.
5. Drag the Lines Menu to the bottom of your screen so that you dont have to go through Autoshapes every time.
6. Open a new document.
7. Set your margins to zero. If you do not, then in Word the scale will be reduced so that the plat will fit within the specified margins
unless you crop the edges of the plat before it is inserted Set your Page Setup to Letter or Legal Length.
1) File
2) Page Setup
3) Margins
4) Paper (Letter or Legal)
8. Insert the scanned .tif file of your area of interest into the Word or Excel document.
1) Insert
2) Picture
3) From File (Browse until you find it, then insert it)
9. Click on the Freeform Tool on the Lines Toolbar you inserted at the bottom of your screen.
10.
Left-Click on a corner of a tract that you want to color or outline. Release the left mouse button and drag the pointer to the
next corner. Click on the left mouse button again to tell it to stop there. Release the left mouse button, and drag the pointer to the next
corner and click again. Repeat this process until you have gone all the away around your tract.
11.
II you did not outline the tract correctly you can right-click inside of the object and select Edit Points. This will allow you
to move an incorrectly placed point to the proper position.
12.

The default color of the object you outlined is white.

1)

If you want to change it to yellow:

Double-Click the object. Go to color, and click on yellow. Note that the object is now colored solid yellow. Click on the
transparency slider and make the tract 50% transparent. The tract is still yellow, but you can ready the Tobin underneath it.
2)

If you just want to outline the tract:

Double-Click the object. Go to Color and select No Fill. Go to Line, Select Dashed, then Select the Weight you want. The
tract will now be outlined. Note that in order to select the tract after you have selected No Fill, you must double-click an
edge of the tract, and not inside it.
3)

If you want to stripe a tract:

Double-Click the object. Go to Color, Fill Effects, and then Pattern. Select the pattern you want.