Q. How can I add “DRAFT” or “COPY” to printouts of my Word document?

You want to print a message on all printed copies of a document, such as “Draft” or “Confidential” or “Copy”, and you are using Microsoft Word.

What you are looking for is a “Watermark”, which is done by modifying the Background of the document.  You can also put a watermark on selected pages only, but that requires that you divide the document into Sections and modify the individual sections to have watermarks or not (see below).

You can add a text watermark, choose one of the stock Microsoft watermarks, or use a custom image.

In Microsoft Word, the general instructions from Microsoft are

On the Page Layout tab, in the Page Background group, click Watermark.

Do one of the following:

• Click a predesigned watermark, such as Confidential or Urgent, in the gallery of watermarks – or
• Click Custom Watermark, click Text watermark and then select or type the text that you want. You can also format the text – or
• Click Picture watermark, and then click Select Picture.
• Select the picture that you want, and then click Insert.
• Select a percentage under Scale to insert the picture at a particular size
• Select the Washout check box to lighten the picture so that it doesn’t interfere with text.

To view a watermark as it will appear on the printed page, use the Print Layout view.

In Word 2011 for Macintosh

• Select Insert
• Choose Watermark
• Either select Text and type in the text you want or choose from the drop down menu of options
• Choose any other settings you want for the watermark (size, font, transparency, font color, and orientation)
• Choose OK

To add watermark to specific pages, you divide your document into Sections first.

• On the Home tab, in the Paragraph group, click Show/Hide so that you can see the page breaks in your document.
  
• In Draft view, replace the page breaks surrounding the pages to which you want to add watermarks with section breaks.
• On the Page Layout tab, in the Page Setup group, click Breaks, and then click Next Page under Section Breaks.
  
• Note  When you insert a cover page in a document, it has a separate header so that you don’t need to create a separate section for it if you’re creating sections to add a watermark only to selected pages.
• Switch to Print Layout view.
• Double-click the document header area on the page where you want the watermark to appear. This opens the header.
• Note: Microsoft Office Word places watermarks in the header even though they don’t appear in the header.
• On the Design tab, in the Navigation group, click Link to Previous so that the headers are no longer linked.
• Double-click the document header area on the first page where you don’t want the watermark to appear â€” for example, the first page of document text â€” and then repeat step 4.
• Click the page where you want the watermark to appear.
• On the Page Layout tab, in the Page Background group, click Watermark and select the watermark that you want.