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Drawing Lines and Shapes
The Drawing tools in PowerPoint are the same as in other Office applications. Word and Excel both have identical tool sets, for example.
The Drawing tools provide for five basic things you can draw. By combining these elements you can make a surprising variety of drawings:
Line
Arrow (that is, a line with an arrowhead on one or both ends)
Rectangle (hold down Ctrl for a perfect square)
Oval (hold down Ctrl for a perfect circle)
AutoShapes (click to open a menu of shapes)
There are dozens of these pre-created shapes on the AutoShapes menu, including all kinds of block arrows, sunbursts, brackets, and flow-charting symbols. Table 7-1 shows each of the submenus and what's on them.
Menu | Name | Description |
|---|---|---|
Lines | Freeform shapes or lines, or straight lines, with or without arrows, used to draw freehand or to call attention to certain objects. | |
Connectors | Flow charting connectors that help create relationship lines between other objects. | |
Basic Shapes | A variety of geometric shapes and simple symbols. | |
Block Arrows | Arrows that are thicker than just lines, useful for flow charting or to call attention to another object. These arrows use both fill and border colors, unlike arrows created from lines. | |
Flowchart | Standard flowchart symbols. | |
Stars and Banners | Lively starbursts and swoops for calling attention to an object or text. Place text inside these shapes for extra impact. | |
Callouts | Thought and speech bubbles for cartoons and explanatory boxes. | |
Action Buttons | Buttons useful for moving from slide to slide in a user-interactive presentation. |
To draw with one of the drawing tools, click it and then drag on the slide. If you need to draw more than one of a certain item, double-click its button rather than clicking it, and it will stay "on" until you turn it off (by clicking the button again or pressing Esc).
| Note | Microsoft Office programs are inconsistent in the use of the term AutoShape, but don't let it confuse you. In some dialog boxes and in the Help system, all drawn objects, including manual text boxes, are generically referred to as AutoShapes, but there is also a special class of pre-drawn shapes called AutoShapes that are accessible from the AutoShapes button on the Drawing toolbar. In this chapter I use the term AutoShape generically to refer to any drawn shape, not just the ones that happen to be on the AutoShapes menu. |
There are all kinds of uses for drawn lines and shapes. For example, you might draw a line with an arrow to point to an important part of a chart. The rectangles and ovals can be used to draw boxes or frames around important slide points or objects. Figure 7-1 shows a chart with an oval and a line enhancing its main point.
Figure 7-1: You can use simple lines and shapes to accentuate the content on a slide.
| Note | An arrow is the same as a line except there's an arrowhead on one or both ends. You can use the Arrow button to draw the line, or you can convert a regular line to an arrow by changing its properties in the Format AutoShape dialog box. |
If you are artistically inclined, you can even attempt to create complete drawings with the drawing tools. Want some examples? Try the following experiment:
Insert a piece of clip art from the Clip Organizer (see Chapter 9, if needed).
Select the clip art and then choose Draw⇨Ungroup. A message appears asking if you want to convert it to a Microsoft Drawing object.
Click Yes, and then choose Draw⇨Ungroup again. The art will be broken down into its individual lines and shapes, as shown in Figure 7-2. Each individual line and shape has its own selection handles; that's why there are all those tiny white circles. (That's a lot of individual drawn objects.)
Drag the individual lines and shapes away from the drawing one by one to deconstruct it.
Figure 7-2: To see an example of what you can do with the drawing tools, deconstruct a piece of clip art.
| Tip | Interested in advanced experimentation with drawing Bezier curves via the drawing tools in PowerPoint? See this excellent online tutorial: www.echosvoice.com/beziercurves. |
Adding Text to an AutoShape
One of my favorite ways to use AutoShapes is to hold text. I mentioned this in Chapter 5, but here it is again. Any AutoShape can be used to hold text. Figure 7-3 shows an example of some starburst AutoShapes being used for text. To make an AutoShape text-capable, right-click it and choose Add Text. An insertion point appears in its center; type the text there.
Figure 7-3: You can use AutoShapes as text boxes.
Duplicating AutoShapes
Many times you might need multiple copies of the same AutoShape. Rather than trying to redraw exact copies, just duplicate the original one.
Here's a really cool feature that not many people know about: PowerPoint automatically equalizes the spacing between multiple pasted copies of a drawn shape if you use Edit⇨Duplicate (Ctrl+D) instead of a regular copy-and-paste. To try this out, do the following:
Create an AutoShape. For this experiment try something odd-shaped like an arrow or chevron.
Choose Edit⇨Duplicate or press Ctrl+D.
Move the copy so that it is positioned in relation to the original in the way that you want all copies to be spaced.
Duplicate again. The new copy appears with the same spacing.
Duplicate again several times. The new copies all get the same spacing. Pretty handy!
