7. Working with Shapes
In This Chapter
- Insertion Tricks
- Drawing Tools Format Tab
- Creating Custom Shapes
- Using Connectors to Save Time
- What Do Those Yellow Diamonds Do?
- The Brand New Selection Pane
- Embedding Objects from Other Applications
- Grouping Shapes and Objects
Most PowerPoint beginners rarely use them at all, but mastering the art of vector shapes is one of the keys to being a PowerPoint power user. Though shapes seem deceptively simple, there’s a great deal of power under the covers.
Insertion Tricks
One of the first things you see when launching PowerPoint is the Shapes gallery or drop-down (see Figure 7.1) located on the Home ribbon in the Drawing group.
Figure 7.1 The Shapes group. The shapes in the Recently Used Shapes section at the top might look different, depending on which shapes you’ve used recently.
Note
Shapes show up as either a drop-down or gallery, depending on the width of the PowerPoint window.
It’s easy to insert shapes from here. The Shapes gallery is also available on the Insert tab in the Illustrations group under Shapes, which is also where it lives in Word and Excel 2007.
Note
PowerPoint 2007 lets you choose from 18 shapes on the Ribbon, compared to the 4 that were on the old PowerPoint 2003 Drawing toolbar.
Expand the gallery, and hundreds of shapes wait for you to click them and create content. So far, you PowerPoint veterans might be rolling your eyes, but let’s look at some shape-related tips that you might not know.
Who Knew There Were So Many Ways to Insert a Shape?
Click one of the many shapes in the gallery. You now have two options:
- Click one time somewhere on the slide. The shape appears at its default size, typically one inch by one inch.
- Click and drag on the slide. This lets you decide at the time of insertion how big you want the object to be.
Okay, that’s easy; but suppose that you’ve been contracted to insert 10 shapes. (I know, work is tough nowadays.) You could click the icon, click or drag on the slide to insert the shape, click the icon, click or drag on the slide, click the icon, and so on. It would take forever, and let’s be honest; you’re smarter than that.
Instead, let’s take advantage of some timesaving alternatives. Here are two tricks to quickly duplicate a bunch of shapes:
- Select the shapes you want to duplicate, hold down Ctrl, and drag any of the selected shapes to another spot on the slide.
- Select the shapes and press Ctrl+D.
After using Ctrl+D to duplicate a shape, the duplicate shape is offset slightly right and down of the previous shape. If the duplicated shape was in the exact same position, you probably wouldn’t see it.
Tip
If you select a slide in the thumbnail pane, Ctrl+D duplicates slides, too.
Lock Drawing Mode
If you right-click a shape from the Shapes gallery, the option to Lock Drawing Mode is displayed (see Figure 7.2). When this option is selected, each time you click and drag on your presentation, a new instance of the shape you selected is created. This makes it easy to insert many shapes at the same time.
Figure 7.2 Right-click a shape in the gallery to use Lock Drawing Mode.
Note
Lock Drawing Mode only stays active for the shape you selected. Clicking just about anything on the Ribbon, such as clicking Bold or clicking another shape to insert, exits Lock Drawing Mode.
How can you tell whether you’re in Lock Drawing Mode? Just look at the mouse pointer. If you have a crosshair mouse pointer, as shown in Figure 7.3, you’re in Shape Insertion Mode. In this state, when you single-click, the default shape size is used (which is usually one inch by one inch). The most common thing to do is to click and drag the shape to a size you’re happy with and then let go to create the shape. After creating the shape, if you still see the crosshair—waiting for you to insert another shape—you know that you’re still in Lock Drawing Mode.
Figure 7.3 The mouse pointer becomes a crosshair during Shape Insertion Mode.
To turn off Lock Drawing Mode, simply select another shape, right-click the shape in the Shapes gallery again and uncheck Lock Drawing Mode, or press Esc on the keyboard.
Note
If you’re familiar with previous versions of PowerPoint, Lock Drawing Mode is equivalent to double-clicking on a shape on the Drawing toolbar. Be careful though; if you double-click on a shape in PowerPoint 2007, you end up with nothing—literally. It sees your first click as selecting the shape, and then the next click is taken as a de-select.
Drawing Tools Format Tab
Immediately after inserting a shape, a Drawing Tools Format tab appears on the Ribbon to give you the ability to format your shapes. We explain contextual tabs such as this one in Chapter 1, “Introducing the Office 2007 User Interface,” when describing the new user interface.
Let’s dissect this new tab group by group so that it doesn’t seem as overwhelming. As shown in Figure 7.4, from left to right on the Drawing Tools Format tab, we have the Insert Shapes group (mentioned briefly already), Shape Styles, WordArt Styles, Arrange, and Size.
Figure 7.4 The Drawing Tools Format tab.
Using Shape Styles
This group is one of the coolest and most useful places to go to make your shapes look great. Right away, you can see previews for several shape styles. The exact number of styles you can see depends on the width of your window. There are many more to choose from if you expand the gallery by clicking on the button at the bottom right of the gallery (see Figure 7.5).
Figure 7.5 A ton of exciting new shape styles are available to format your shapes with a single click.
Hover over any of the shape styles, and Live Preview kicks in and gives you a little taste of what would happen if you actually clicked this style. If you want to apply a style to multiple objects, just select them first using Ctrl+click, or drag to marquee-select them.
The styles available to you can change anything from the shape fill to the shape outline to the text color, or you can add any of the cool new effects to the shape that we talk more about in Chapter 12, “Formatting Shapes, Text, and More.”
Applying a Shape Fill
If you’re adventurous enough to pass on the preset shape styles offered in the gallery, you always have the option of changing different attributes of the shape yourself. Let’s look at one quick way of using the Drawing Tools Format tab to add a fill. (Chapter 12 goes into much more detail on shape formatting.)
To customize the fill of your shape, first click on the Shape Fill button (see Figure 7.6) to the right of the styles gallery.
Figure 7.6 The Shape Fill button is your portal to modifying the innards of your shape.
Just as color scheme colors were displayed prominently in previous versions of PowerPoint, the Theme Colors are located on the top row of the color picker. (Learn more about themes in Chapter 11, “Dissecting Themes.”) The rest of the color picker contains tints of the theme colors. Located below this is a set of Standard Colors you might be interested in, followed by No Fill for when you want the shape to be filled with nothing. Clicking any of these sets the fill color on the shape.
We’ve only grazed the surface of fills here. You will learn much more about fills—including picture, gradient, and texture fills—in Chapter 12.
New Shapes
Office users have requested that new shapes be added to the product, and in PowerPoint 2007, Microsoft listened. The shapes are still segmented into groups such as Lines, Basic Shapes, Block Arrows, Flowchart, Stars and Banners, Callouts, and Action Buttons. However, there’s an increase in the number of shapes in each group between PowerPoint 2003 and PowerPoint 2007; there’s a new Equation Shapes group, and you can notice subtle improvements in even classic shapes such as hearts and arrows.
Note
The shape improvements in PowerPoint 2007 are too massive to fully document in this book. But, we mention one subtle example here—block arrows. In PowerPoint 2003, if you stretched a block arrow very wide, the entire arrow grew proportionally; so for large arrows, you would get a very large arrowhead. Though this could be mitigated by manually adjusting the yellow diamond (more details later in this chapter), the process was not fun. In PowerPoint 2007, block arrows “limo stretch,” meaning stretch like a limousine. If you stretch a PowerPoint 2007 block arrow very wide, the body of the arrow grows, but the arrowhead stays the same size, which is usually what you want.
Creating Custom Shapes
The cookie cutter shapes in the gallery aren’t enough to satisfy your thirst for shapes? No problem. Create your own.
Choosing a Shape Tool
From the Drawing group on the Home tab, click the Shapes button and select Freeform or Scribble. These are the last two items in the Lines section in the large Shapes drop-down (see Figure 7.7).
Figure 7.7 The Freeform and Scribble tools in the Shapes drop-down.
With the Freeform tool selected, click to create a point, move the mouse to a new location, and click. A new point is added and a line appears between the two points. Continue this process until you’re finished creating your shape. Double-click or press Esc to stop creating new points. Figure 7.8 shows an example of something crazy we drew. Scribble is less structured and just lets you...well...scribble.
Figure 7.8 The Freeform and Scribble tools allow you to release your inner creative beast. This one was made with the Scribble tool.
Note
Similar to Freeform and Scribble, the Arc tool—which is near the two in the Shapes drop-down—can be used to create custom lines.
Editing Shapes
Once inserted, these shapes are infinitely malleable. Impossible, you say? There’s no way they could be that flexible, you say? Let’s edit some points:
1. Right-click on the shape you just created, and you should see the contextual menu shown in Figure 7.9. Select the Edit Points command.
Figure 7.9 You can find the Edit Points command when right-clicking a Freeform or Scribble shape.
2. When Edit Points is selected, you enter Edit Points mode, where you can move vertices of the shape and also drag pieces of an existing line to create a new point (see Figure 7.10).
Figure 7.10 Edit Points mode allows you to drag points on the shape to change it. The red line gives you a preview of how it will look.
Editing Line Segments and Points
In this mode, if you right-click on a line segment, more options are available to create curved line segments, close off a path, and basically help you create a custom shape that isn’t pasted in as a picture and will actually “act like a shape.” Acting like a shape means that it is fully editable and themeable just like any of the premade shapes you can insert.
Similarly, right-clicking on an existing point gives you the option to create a smooth, straight, or corner point in addition to adding a new point or deleting the one selected.
When you’re in Edit Points mode, the cursor looks different when you hover over a point compared to when you hover over a line segment. Make sure that you see the correct cursor before right-clicking, so you don’t accidentally edit a point when you’re trying to edit a line segment, or vice versa. The points cursor has a rectangle center with four arrows coming out of it, whereas the lines cursor looks like a cross with no arrows.
It can often be hard to manage all the points that are editable on one shape. Try zooming in using the zoom bar at the bottom-right corner of your PowerPoint window to make everything bigger.
Hiding Portions of Pictures
Let’s take a look at an interesting example of a use of Edit Points.
Suppose that your favorite photo and image editor is broken or too hard to use, and you would like to hide part of a picture.
1. Insert the picture into the Presentation.
2. Click the Freeform tool, as shown previously in Figure 7.7, to begin inserting a custom shape.
3. Draw a shape around the area you want to cover up (see Figure 7.11). This should be a simple shape, where you click, release, move, click, release, move, and so on. If you instead click and drag to draw the shape, PowerPoint adds many endpoints to your custom shape, which might be difficult to edit later.
Figure 7.11 Let’s hide the right side of this picture by covering it with a custom shape. You can be less precise in this step since step 6 will fix it up.
4. To remove the outline, go to the Drawing Tools Format tab’s Shape Styles group and select Shape Outline, No Outline.
5. Fill the shape with the color of the background that you want to use to hide the picture by choosing the Drawing Tools Format tab, and then in the Shape Styles group, click Shape Fill (see Figure 7.12).
Figure 7.12 Fill the custom shape to hide the picture. Remember, this shape you just made is just like any other shape—you can do anything to it!
Tip
In Figure 7.12, we’ve simply filled the shape with a solid white color, but if you want the shape to take on the fill of the slide background, try using a slide background fill. See the “Background Fill” section in Chapter 12.
6. Modify the existing points, create new ones, and curve the lines to exactly fill up the space you want to cover.
Using Connectors to Save Time
Office lines are the smartest shapes you will ever meet. They’re ideal for the perfectionist, the indecisive, and the lazy.
In PowerPoint 97–2003, there were lines and there were connectors. Lines were...well...lines. Connectors had the special behavior described in this section, where the ends stuck to other shapes. In PowerPoint 2007, the two concepts are merged. Static, non-connectable lines are no more, and the combined concept is simply called a “line.” To accommodate those who just want lines to work the way they always have, as well as to appease the crowd who never connected their lines to anything, the new lines were made slightly less sensitive than old school Office 2003 connectors.
The perfectionist creates a presentation full of shapes and inserts arrows and lines to represent relationships between ideas, and then realizes that he needs a few rectangles by a few pixels each, which requires manually updating all the lines (see Figure 7.13). For a more complicated diagram, repositioning all the shapes would take hours alone, not to mention updating all the arrows and relationships.
Figure 7.13 You would be hating life if you had to move this shape, along with all the lines attached to it, somewhere else. Each shape and line would have to be individually moved after moving the first shape.
Tip
For simpler diagrams, consider using a SmartArt diagram instead of creating your own from scratch. They usually look better than anything you can make yourself in a short amount of time. For more information about SmartArt, see Chapter 5, “Diagrams and SmartArt.”
This is where using connected lines saves you time and makes it super easy to reposition everything later.
How to Connect
First, add a bunch of shapes to your slide. We need shapes so that we have something to connect.
Next, to insert a line, go to the Drawing group on the Home tab and click Shapes. Insert one of the first couple of lines in the Lines section.
To connect a line with something, simply
1. Move the end of a line close to another shape until you see the shape’s red connection sites light up (see Figure 7.14). Make sure that you’re dragging just the endpoint of the line and not the entire line, or this won’t work.
Figure 7.14 When you move the end of a line near another shape, the shape’s connection sites will light up, showing you where you can dock the line.
2. Release the line end on top of one of the connection sites to dock it there. If the line end turns red, you know that you’ve successfully docked.
By connecting lines with other shapes, the lines will remember what they’re connected to and automatically reroute when those objects move. This happens whether the connections are moved, rotated, resized, or flipped (see Figure 7.15). How cool is that?
Figure 7.15 After being connected, the line moves when the shape moves.
Tip
In addition to moving the ends of existing lines to connect them to objects, you can also create a connection when first creating a line. After choosing a line from the new Shapes drop-down, move the crosshairs cursor near a shape, and you should see the connection points light up in red.
Rerouting Lines
If you don’t like how PowerPoint draws the line after you’ve docked the two line ends to different objects, you have the ability to reroute the line so that it goes where you want it to go. This command finds the closest connection sites between two objects and moves the line there. You can find the rerouting command by right-clicking a connector and choosing Reroute Connectors.
Alternatively, if you know exactly how you want the line to connect, just select the end of a line and manually drag the end to another connection spot.
Note
PowerPoint is inconsistent with its “line” and “connector” terminology. In the Ribbon, when you’re inserting a line from the Home tab, Drawing group, Shapes gallery, you insert them from the section of the Shapes gallery. When you right-click a line, however, the contextual menu has both a Reroute Connectors and a Connector Types option. Rest assured, though, that although there was a difference in previous versions of Office, in 2007, there’s no difference between a line and a connector.
Customizing Lines
Connectable lines are customizable and come in three main flavors: straight, elbow, and curved (see Figure 7.16). They are your be-all and end-all tools for creating any sort of organizational chart or diagram that involves any sort of flow, direction, or relationship among various components (well, except for SmartArt; see Chapter 5).
Figure 7.16 The three different types of connectable lines are straight, elbow, curved—each of which can have different end types: no arrow, arrow, and double arrowed.
Don’t forget! Lines can be formatted with different widths, line styles, and colors, as well as arrows at one end, both ends, or none at all. Learn more about formatting in Chapter 12.
What Do Those Yellow Diamonds Do?
Some shapes have a yellow diamond adjust handle, which can modify how the shape looks by changing certain parts of its geometry. Notice how this smiley face shape has the yellow diamond in the middle of the mouth. This is called an adjust handle. You can drag the adjust handle up to make the shape sad or ambivalent (see Figure 7.17).
Figure 7.17 Here’s a typical smiley face autoshape. Notice the yellow diamond indicating an adjust handle on its mouth. By dragging the diamond up, the smile inverts and is now a frown.
Watch for the yellow diamond whenever you insert a shape. It’s just one more way to customize a shape so that it looks more the way you like. It also makes the number of possible shapes endless (see Figure 7.18). You can change any type of arrow, callout, or any other shape into exactly what you’re looking for.
Figure 7.18 Here’s a little taste of some of the variations on shapes when adjusted.
Most shapes have a stick at the top with a green circle. Clicking and dragging the circle lets you rotate the shape. You can find more tips about the rotation stick in Chapter 14 (“Positioning Slide Elements” in the “Rotate Shortcuts” section).
Like the yellow diamonds, WordArt with a text Transform effect also has a diamond-shaped adjust handle. These are purple instead of yellow. It seems weird that it’s a different color, but it’s so that you can have an adjustable shape that contains adjustable, transformed text and you won’t be confused which handle controls what. You can find these text effects on the Format ribbon tab by going to the WordArt Styles group and clicking Text Effects, and then choosing Transform.
The Brand New Selection Pane
One of the trickiest part of having many objects and shapes on a slide is selecting one that is hidden by others or has only a small part visible because of other obstructions on your slide. To solve this, a new Selection pane was added to PowerPoint 2007 (see Figure 7.19).
Figure 7.19 PowerPoint 2007’s new Selection pane.
PowerPoint 2003 had a similar Select Multiple Objects dialog. However, it was a hidden power user feature that was not accessible by default from any of the toolbars or menus.
To activate the Selection pane, go to the Home tab in the Editing group, and click Select. Then, choose Select Pane from the drop-down.
Now you can click on items in this pane, and it selects the corresponding object in your slide. Click on the text of the object to change its name for use later when you need to refer to this object, such as for Custom Animations or Action Settings. This is the best way to change the name of an object and to distinguish it from others.
If you hold down the Ctrl key and click on other items, they are also selected. However, not all selection behaviors apply. For example, the Shift+click operation does not select multiple objects.
The eyeball icon to the right of each item toggles the visibility of the object when clicked. An open eyeball means that the object is visible, but when clicked, it becomes a blank square; you will notice that the shape is no longer visible on the slide. If you hide a shape here, it is invisible throughout PowerPoint, including during a slideshow.
This is a great tool to help you select objects that are behind others, as well as change the depth level (z-order of the objects) because the Selection pane treats the objects on the top as the topmost objects in the slide. Use the Re-order up and down arrow buttons to change the order of the objects.
Note
PowerPoint objects, such as shapes, all have depth, or z-order. If you move one shape so that it overlaps with another, one of the two shapes always stays on top. The bottom shape is said to have greater “depth” and a lower “z-order.” You can change which shape appears on top by right-clicking one of the shapes and using Bring to Front and Send to Back to change its depth. The Selection pane arrows also change the order.
Take a Shortcut with the Tab Key
Are you one of those people who hates to use the mouse? Then there’s good news! You can still select shapes/objects and fill them with text without ever leaving the comfort of your keyboard.
Yes, we’re talking about the Tab key. Pressing Tab cycles through the existing shapes and objects on the current slide so that you can save yourself a click or two and a potential carpel tunnel injury. If you don’t have anything selected, Tab selects the placeholders in order and then any other objects on the slide.
After you have selected a placeholder, shape, or text box that you want to type into, press Enter to enter text mode and type whatever you want. When you’re done, press Esc once to exit back out to the top level and resume tabbing to move around again.
Embedding Objects from Other Applications
One of our favorite things about Microsoft is that all its children play nicely together, and PowerPoint is a good citizen in the Microsoft application community. Insert Object is a perfect example of using OLE technologies to integrate objects from different applications into others.
Note
OLE stands for object linking and embedding, pronounced oh-lay, as in “Oil of Olay.” OLE tries to accomplish a marriage between various applications, where parts of one application can be hosted inside another application. Think of it as being able to insert a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet inside your presentation. It’s not just limited to Microsoft Office applications, though, and you can embed anything inside PowerPoint that obeys the OLE interfaces. The first version of Office to support OLE 2 was Office 95.
The entries in the Insert Object menu are created based on the applications installed on your computer that support exporting an OLE object. By default, most of the Office applications support this, so if you have a spectacular Visio diagram full of intricate flow charts and diagrams and want to use it in a presentation, Insert Object is the way to go.
On the Insert tab, go to the Text group and click Object. Choose an Object type to create something new (see Figure 7.20). For example, you can embed an Excel spreadsheet inside of PowerPoint by choosing Microsoft Office Excel Worksheet. Or, select the Create from File option and point to an existing file.
Figure 7.20 Choosing Object from the Insert tab opens the Insert Object dialog for creating OLE objects.
Suppose that you then want to edit this embedded object. Simply double-click on the object to “activate” it. It’s actually running the other program, only inside of PowerPoint. Notice in Figure 7.21 that we’re editing the Excel worksheet inside of PowerPoint. Even the Ribbon tabs are Excel specific.
Figure 7.21 When activated, an OLE object acts just as it would in its native host application.
To return to normal PowerPoint editing mode, simply click outside your newly inserted object, and you will see a deactivated OLE object. When deactivated, an OLE object looks much like a picture or screenshot of the current state of the object.
The Esc Key
The Esc key—you know, the top-left button on your keyboard—lets you abort many operations in PowerPoint. It lets you easily change your mind when
- You’re dragging out a new shape to insert, but you totally change your mind. Press Esc, and no shape is inserted.
- You’re resizing something by dragging one of the resize dots on the side. Press Esc, and the object reverts to its original size.
- As long as you don’t release the mouse button, it lets you easily change your mind while moving something. Press Esc, and the object returns to its original position.
- Pressing Esc lets you move out one level in a selection. For example, if you’re editing text inside a placeholder, press Esc, and the placeholder is selected instead. Or if you’re inside an OLE object, pressing Esc a few times will exit OLE editing and move you back out to the slide.
- No matter what you have selected, pressing Esc a few times lets you deselect everything on the slide.
Of course, after you’ve already done the insertion, resize, or move, if you change your mind, just press Ctrl+Z to undo the operation. But Esc can save you a few precious seconds.
Grouping Shapes and Objects
Grouping shapes and objects is an excellent way to maintain order in your festooned presentation.
After you have positioned shapes and objects in a manner you like, group them so that you won’t have to modify each one individually. This is particularly useful when you combine shapes to create new ones.
To do so, select the shapes you want to group, right-click one of the selected shapes, select Group and then select Group again.
Now you’re left with a set of selection handles surrounding the objects you grouped (see Figure 7.22). You can resize/move/flip/rotate and perform any operation on this group that you could on a shape. You can even group several groups!
Figure 7.22 A group of shapes.
Ungrouping and Regroup
Say that you changed your mind and don’t want a group after all. Simply ungroup by right-clicking the group and choosing Group, Ungroup, and the group is returned to individual objects and shapes. Then, perform whatever modifications you would like.
Oops, we changed our minds. We actually want a group after all. Instead of again going through all the trouble of figuring out what shapes belonged to your group, simply right-click that shape again and choose Regroup. PowerPoint is smart enough to remember what was grouped last and combines them into one group again.
Even if some of the shapes in your original shape are deleted, PowerPoint does its best to regroup any surviving shapes. If all but one shape is deleted, however, the Regroup command is disabled.
Also note that regroup information is not saved in the presentation, so if you ungroup, save a presentation, and reopen the presentation, you can no longer regroup. That group is lost.
Group Trivia
Now that we’ve covered the basics of groups, let’s cover some more interesting trivia about PowerPoint groups:
- New to PowerPoint 2007, Ctrl+G groups items together, due to popular demand. In previous versions of PowerPoint, this brought up the Grids and Guides dialog (learn more about Grids and Guides in Chapter 14, which is about positioning). Ctrl+Shift+G ungroups an existing group.
- Before PowerPoint 2007, items inside groups could not be moved or resized. Ungrouping and regrouping was much more common in order to make last minute positioning tweaks. In PowerPoint 2007, objects inside groups can be moved to your heart’s content, and the group updates its size to accommodate the changes. You can even remove items from a group without regrouping. But even in PowerPoint 2007, groups inside groups cannot be updated. Only the top-level group and the bottom-level shapes can be modified without ungrouping.
- Placeholders cannot belong inside groups. If something changes on the master, PowerPoint doesn’t have to dive inside every group on every slide to look for placeholders to update.
- PowerPoint stashes information inside groups themselves. For example, if you apply an animation to a group, that information is stored on the group. If you ungroup, that destroys the group and the animation is lost.