Use Commonly-available Software to Manipulate Images

Professional graphic designers use expensive software like Photoshop and Illustrator to work with image files.  There are free alternatives such as The Gimp and Inkscape, and they are marvelous, but there's still a steep learning curve, and they are really overkill if all you want to do is quick and dirty stuff.  Also, if you are working at someone else's computer, say a friend or relative, or a public PC at a library or Internet café, you may not have access to these tools.

In this Instructable, I'll show you how to use Microsoft Word and MS Paint, readily available on most Windows-based PCs, to make a single .jpg combining several different elements. These are going to be low-res images, suitable for posting on, for instance, Instructables.com. :-)

NOTE: I am using the Office 2007 version of MS Word.  This instructable will work with 2003, but some of the steps will look different because of the UI changes.

Step 1 Launch!

Usually you can find icons for the programs you want to use on the Windows desktop, but there's a fun shortcut for bringing them up without hunting for the icon.  If you click Start->Run (or use the Windows key and hit R) you'll get a little dialog to run text commands.  Launch Word by typing "winword", Paint with "mspaint" and Internet Explorer with "iexplore" or a URL.

To begin with, you'll want to open Word with a blank document.  Make sure Word is in Print Layout View by clicking the appropriate icon in the lower right, or by choosing View->Print Layout.