How can I put a background image on a certain position on all pages?

Question

I want to have a background image on all pages of a document. I know about the watermark "trick", but that does not help in this case because a watermark image cannot be repositioned; it always covers the entire page. I want my background image to be on the left side only. The background image should not interfere with normal text editing.

How can I set such a background image in Word 2013?

Solution

Word does not provide a native way to freely position background images, not even Word 2013. But you can work around that limitation by simply placing images in the header. Make sure to set the layout option to something different than "in line with text" and you can freely position the image on the page:

Comments

[Jaime de los Hoyos M.]

Thanks, this really helped me out. I used it to generate a form template which uses a scanned document as the background, and then automatically fills it out using transparent text boxes that get completed using a series of VBA macros. Positioning the background form image was absolutely impossible without using this trick.