Tech Tuesday: Making a background image on multiple pages of a table in Google Docs - or - Use the Page Break!

 So I had this idea to make a chart for my students to fill out on how Heathcliff is a Byronic hero in Wuthering Heights.  I also wanted them to find two other Byronic heroes from sources of their own choosing.

I chose to use Google Docs for this mainly because my new school computer does not have Microsoft Word and I am too cheap to buy it.  I will throw in a plug for Open Office which is a decent free alternative.

Creating the table is no problem, but I wanted it to look fancy, so I imported in an image for the background of the first page.

Getting this image to fit here was not much of a problem either.  I set the image to be behind the text and I selected FIX POSITION ON PAGE in the edit box that appeared under it (though sometimes it appears above).

That was the easy part.  The problem I had came about when I tried to put an image as the background of the second page.  For some reason, every time I tried to move a new photo into the table, it would eventually jump to the top of the first page.  I tried:

1. changing where I was importing the image

2. deleting the table that continued onto the second page and creating a new table instead for the rows on the second page

3. creating the second page as a separate document and then copying and pasting it into the original document

All of these resulted in either the image jumping to the first page or disappearing altogether.

I did get it to work, though.

I was about to give up, but I tried one more thing.  I went back to each page being a separate table rather than just wrapping over to the next page.  Then, between the two, I selected INSERT then BREAK then PAGE BREAK.  This puts an automatic stop and will always make the next page its own page.  

An odd thing to make a blog entry over, but if you like to play around with the background images then maybe this will help you out in the future.