When it comes to journaling in our scrapbooks, many of us look for alternatives to old fashioned pen and paper. I know Ive used stickers and diecuts to help write my message. I find just pen and paper sometimes are not quite what I want.

Next time you want to journal, but dont wish to handwrite, consider using your computer and a word processor.

There are so many ways to use a word processor to manipulate text. The very basics are to open a word document, type your text and then alter the font and sizing to your liking. You can also shade and underline words in a simple text document.

Both Microsoft Word and Word Perfect have a feature called word art. In Microsoft Word, go to the insert column in the top menu. Click on picture and then word art. In Word Perfect, again go to the insert column in the top menu, then click on graphics and text art.

Both programs allow you take words and make them into an arc, a circle etc. Have fun and play around with the many features of both programs and look at all of the various ways your text can appear.

In Microsoft Word, once you type the text, you can click on it and youll get another menu box along side the text. If you click on the abc, which is word art shape you can choose to have your text any shape youd like. In Word Perfect, the shape is available on the first text screen.

There are just so many options to choose from. You can create page titles for your pages. You can journal about a particular photo. You can make a cover page for the entire album.

With these text features, you truly can match text size, shape and color to the rest of your layout, the overall theme of a page, or an entire album.

After youve created your text, print it out first on a white sheet of paper to see exactly how it will look and if it needs to be moved or changed. Once you are happy with the layout of the text, insert a sheet of acid free paper into your printer and print your text. Then cut out the text according to how you want the text on your scrapbook page. You can also print the text directly on your background sheet, eliminating the need to cut the text.

You can also create outline text, make it large and then color it in, according to the color theme of your page. Truly the ideas are limitless as to what you can do with computer generated text.