I've got a bunch of spreadsheets for running orders for a show I'm running Sunday, and I wanted to put 'ring steward's copy' or something in pale grey diagonally across the whole page, just so that if someone puts one down, it won't get picked up accidentally by a competitor so the steward then doesn't have one! Is it possible to do something like this? I've got it as one document with a different worksheet for each class, so could hopefully group the whole lot and do it in one go.

Try this: in MS Word go to Page Layout on the toolbar, then click on Watermark, click on Custom Watermark, then tick the box for Text Watermark and select Font, Size and Colour. In MS Excel you could experiment with Page Layout, then select Background--I think you can only use images, but I'm no expert.

Depending on what version of excel you're using, you can create a watermark effect across the page using wordart.  Then just alter the text colour & effects.

It's in Excel, wish that had a Watermark! I suppose I could paste each sheet into Word to create a watermark. It only seemed to want to have pictures for backgrounds, alas..... I'll try pasting into Word if nothing better gets suggested, thanks!

Hubby suggested wordart, but everything is greyed out when I located it. He's at the pub at the mo, so might be able to help when he gets back. Thanks!

It does seem strange that MS Excel lacks this facility--I'm sure you should be able to do it but for the life of me I can't see it :-O

That suggests to me that you don't have the full 'working' version of Excel perhaps?

What about just inserting a header on the worksheets that need 'judges copy' wording?

Aha, I have got the wordart going now, but even at 100% transparency it's still blocking out the words underneath a bit too much. No idea why it's persisting in being slightly purple when I've selected pale grey fill with white lines either! I may have to go with the header plan. Can you have more than 1 header? I've got them all saying the trial name and date at the moment, don't really want to lose that.

And now I've persuaded it to move under the lists of names instead of having it right across them - not quite as cool as having it across but very greyed out so you could still see the name printing clearly, but it'll be fine. Thanks!

You could just alter the wordart text fill so that the transparency is lighter on the text.  That way the watermark still stands proud, if you like, but you can see the body of text of the worksheet underneath.

Well done :)

May be if you can't do it in Excel you could print the data from Excel  and then add what ever you wanted on top with a different program, I use Serif Page Plus or Adobe Page Maker but any program that will allow diagonal words would do then just use a very pale colour and not too heavy.

Try doing it by going to print then printer settings, advance settings it should give you watermark there. on all my printers I can do custom watermark.

I went on Excel help and this came up - will this help?  I haven't tried it yet!

Add a sheet background
Click the worksheet that you want to display with a sheet background. Make sure only one worksheet is selected.
On the Format menu, point to Sheet, and then click Background.
Select the picture that you want to use for the sheet background, and then click Insert.
The selected picture is repeated to fill the sheet.

Notes

To improve readability, you can hide cell gridlines and apply solid color shading to cells that contain data.
A sheet background is saved with the worksheet data when you save the workbook.

Remove a sheet background
Click the worksheet that is displayed with a sheet background. Make sure only one worksheet is selected.
On the Format menu, point to Sheet, and then click Delete Background.

Note   If the worksheet that you select does not have a sheet background applied, Delete Background will not be available.

Thanks to all for your ideas and help - I think I've got something workable now. :-)

I did try this in the end Lucy and wordart probably is your best bet!

Its nice though :) just need to figure out what to use it for ha ha!

Has your printer got an option to add a 'stamp'?
I have a canon all-in-one, I can choose from custom 'stamps' or add my own (just type what you require), then opt to have the stamp appear on top of or behind the text.