Chapter at a Glance

It’s easy to think of the Microsoft Office programs—Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint—as programs for creating text-based content. But, in fact, each of these programs includes tools that make it easy to create or incorporate graphic elements into the documents, workbooks, and presentations you create. The 2008 versions of these programs include two new utilities—the Object Palette of the Toolbox and the extremely groovy SmartArt utility—with which you can quite easily add pizzazz to Word documents, Excel workbooks, and PowerPoint presentations.

You can insert shapes, symbols, pictures from your computer, and professional-quality art—including photographs, clip art, and animations—into a document, worksheet, or presentation from the Object Palette. You can create really amazing SmartArt diagrams depicting concepts such as processes, cycles, relationships, and hierarchies.

In this chapter, you’ll explore the variety of pre-made graphics that you can insert into documents, worksheets, and presentations. Then you’ll create a SmartArt graphic, insert content into it, and change the way it looks.

Practice Makes Perfect!

The practice files you will use to complete the exercises in this chapter are in the CreateGraphics practice file folder. See "Using the Companion Content" at the beginning of this book for information about installing and locating the practice files.