The shadow effect creates a shadow around your letters. The shadows can be applied using various lighting angles, which allows you to set the direction of the shadows. The length of the shadows (how far the shadows extend away from the letters) can be adjusted, as well as their thickness. You can also set the opacity of the shadows, which allows you to control how transparent the shadows are.
The glow effect in WordArt allows you to apply glowing effects to your text. The glow effect can be set to use any color and combined with shadow and diffuse effects to create a variety of neon or pastel edges. Glow effects work well for creating signs, cards and headlines with an appearance that resembles a neon sign. Glowing edges around the letter can be single; they can be doubled or layered with various colors.
Beveling allows you to give your text a raised, sculpted look. Beveling gives your letters a sloping effect. Beveled text can be clicked on then rotated. This allows you to to take advantage of the built-in lighting effects in the WordArt tool to highlight the angles of your fonts. Changing the shadows in this way also lets you emphasize the shiny surfaces of the beveled edges of your text fonts.
Word Art has 3-D tool that allows you to give any text three-dimensional depth and dimension. By combining any of the other WordArt effects with the 3-D tool, you can create 3-D text that can be used for newsletters, cards, banners or even saved for use as a title for your website.