PowerPoint 2016 For Dummies (2016)
Part III
Embellishing Your Slides
Find out how to hyperlink your slide to summon another slide, another presentation, or some other type of document (such as a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet) at www.dummies.com/extras/powerpoint2016.
In this part …
Get familiar with the different types of computer pictures, how you can insert them into a PowerPoint slide, and how you can fiddle with them to get them to look better.
Find out about the powerful drawing tools of PowerPoint 2016.
Understand how to add a chart to your presentation and get it to look the way you want.
Learn to add all sorts of embellishments to your slides, including one of the coolest ways to embellish your slides — adding special diagrams called SmartArt.
Discover how to include and edit video and sound elements in your slide show, thus giving you the power to craft some impressive high-tech presentations.
Know how to insert tables, WordArt, hyperlinks, and actions into your presentations.
Chapter 12
Drawing on Your Slides
In This Chapter
Using the PowerPoint drawing tools
Using predefined shapes
Drawing polygons or curved lines
Changing colors and line types
Creating 3-D objects
Flipping and rotating objects
Using advanced tricks
Art time! Get your crayons and glue and don an old paint shirt. You’re going to cut out some simple shapes and paste them on your PowerPoint slides so that people either think that you’re a wonderful artist or scoff at you for not using clip art.
This chapter covers the drawing features of PowerPoint 2016. Once upon a time, PowerPoint had but rudimentary drawing tools — the equivalent of a box of crayons — but PowerPoint now has powerful drawing tools that are sufficient for all but the most sophisticated aspiring artists.
Some General Drawing Tips
Before getting into the specifics of using each PowerPoint drawing tool, the following sections describe a handful of general tips for drawing pictures.
Zooming in
When you work with the PowerPoint drawing tools, you might want to increase the zoom factor so that you can draw more accurately. I often work at 200, 300, or even 400 percent when I’m drawing. To change the zoom factor, use the zoom slider located in the bottom-right corner of the screen.
Before you change the zoom factor to edit an object, select the object that you want to edit. This way, PowerPoint zooms in on that area of the slide. If you don’t select an object before you zoom in, you might need to scroll around to find the right location.
Note that on a touchscreen device, you can zoom in and out by using a two-fingered pinch gesture. And on a device with a mouse, you can quickly zoom by holding down the Ctrl key while spinning the mouse wheel.
Displaying the ruler, gridlines, and guides
PowerPoint provides three onscreen features that can help you line up your drawings:
· Ruler: Horizontal and vertical rulers appear at the top and to the left of the slide.
· Gridlines: A grid of evenly spaced dots appears directly on the slide.
· Guides: A pair of horizontal and vertical lines intersect on your slide like crosshairs in a target.
You can activate any or all of these features by clicking the View tab on the Ribbon and selecting the Ruler, Gridlines, or Guides check box. Figure 12-1 shows PowerPoint with the rulers, gridlines, and guides displayed.
Figure 12-1: PowerPoint with the rulers, gridlines, and guides on.
When you work with drawing objects, the ruler is positioned so that zero is at the middle of the slide. When you edit a text object, the ruler changes to a text ruler that measures from the margins and indicates tab positions.
For more information about using the gridlines or guides, see the section “Using the grids and guides,” later in this chapter.
Sticking to the color scheme
You can assign individual colors to each object that you draw, but the purpose of the PowerPoint color schemes (described in Chapter 8) is to talk you out of doing that. If possible, let solid objects default to the color scheme’s fill color, or, if you must change the fill color, change it to one of the alternative colors provided by the scheme. The beauty of doing this is that if you change the color scheme later, the fill color for objects changes to reflect the new fill color. After you switch to a color that’s not in the theme, however, the object ignores any subsequent changes to the theme.
Saving frequently
Drawing is tedious work. You don’t want to spend two hours working on a particularly important drawing only to lose it all just because a comet strikes your building or an errant Scud lands in your backyard. You can prevent catastrophic loss from incidents such as these by pressing Ctrl+S or by frequently clicking the Save button as you work. And always wear protective eyewear.
Remembering Ctrl+Z
In my opinion, Ctrl+Z — the ubiquitous Undo command — is the most important keyboard shortcut in any Windows program, and PowerPoint is no exception. Remember that you’re never more than one keystroke away from erasing a boo-boo. If you do something silly — like forgetting to group a complex picture before trying to move it — you can always press Ctrl+Z to undo your last action. Ctrl+Z is my favorite and most frequently used PowerPoint key combination. (For left-handed mouse users, Alt+Backspace does the same thing.) And if you aren’t ready to climb on a chair shrieking at the first sign of a mouse, try clicking the handy Undo button on the Quick Access Toolbar.
Drawing Simple Objects
To draw an object on a slide, first call up the Insert tab on the Ribbon. Then click the Shapes button (located in the Illustrations group) to reveal a gallery of shapes you can choose from, as shown in Figure 12-2. Finally, select the shape you want to draw from the Shapes gallery.
Figure 12-2: The Shapes gallery.
You find detailed instructions for drawing with the more important tools in the Shapes gallery in the following sections. Before I get to that, though, I want to give you some pointers to keep in mind:
· Choosing a location: Before you draw an object, move to the slide on which you want to draw the object. If you want the object to appear on every slide in the presentation, display the Slide Master by choosing Slide Master in the Master Views section of the View tab on the Ribbon or by Shift+clicking the Normal View button.
· 
Fixing a mistake: If you make a mistake while drawing a shape, the Undo command on the Quick Access Toolbar can usually correct the mistake for you.
· Holding down the Shift key: If you hold down the Shift key while drawing a shape, PowerPoint forces the shape to be “regular.” That is, rectangles are squares, ellipses are circles, and lines are constrained to horizontal or vertical, or 45-degree diagonals.
Drawing straight lines
You can use the Line button to draw straight lines on your slides. Here’s the procedure:
1. 
Click the Line button in the Shapes group on the Insert tab.
2. Point the cursor to where you want the line to start.
3. Click and drag the cursor to where you want the line to end.
4. Release the mouse button when you reach your destination.
After you’ve drawn the shape, the Ribbon displays the Drawing Tools tab, as shown in Figure 12-3. You can then use the controls in the Shape Styles group to change the fill, outline, and effects applied to the line.
Figure 12-3: The Format tab of the Drawing Tools ribbon.
After you’ve drawn a line, you can adjust it by clicking it and then dragging the handles that appear on each end of the line.
Remember that you can force a line to be perfectly horizontal or vertical by holding down the Shift key while you draw. If you hold the Shift key and drag diagonally while you draw the line, the line will be constrained to perfect 45-degree angles.
Drawing rectangles, squares, ovals, and circles
To draw a rectangle, follow these steps:
1. 
On the Insert tab, click the Shape buttons (in the Illustrations group), then click the Rectangle button.
2. Point the cursor to where you want one corner of the rectangle to be positioned.
3. Click and drag to where you want the opposite corner of the rectangle to be positioned.
4. Release the mouse button.
The steps for drawing an oval are the same as the steps for drawing a rectangle except that you click the Oval button rather than the Rectangle button. To draw a square or perfectly round circle, select the Rectangle button or the Oval button but hold down the Shift key while you draw.
You can adjust the size or shape of a rectangle or circle by clicking it and dragging any of its love handles (the small circles you see at the corners of the shape).
Creating Other Shapes
Rectangles and circles aren’t the only two shapes that PowerPoint can draw automatically. The Shapes gallery includes many other types of shapes you can draw, such as pentagons, stars, and flowchart symbols.
The Shapes gallery (refer to Figure 12-2) organizes shapes into the following categories:
· Recently Used Shapes: The top section of the gallery lists as many as 24 of the shapes you’ve used most recently. The shapes found in this section change each time you draw a new shape.
· Lines: Straight lines, curved lines, lines with arrowheads, scribbly lines, and free-form shapes that can become polygons if you want. The free-form shape is useful enough to merit its own section, “Drawing a polygon or free-form shape,” later in this chapter.
· Rectangles: Basic rectangular shapes, including not just a regular rectangle but also rectangles with corners lopped off.
· Basic Shapes: Squares, rectangles, triangles, crosses, happy faces, lightning bolts, hearts, clouds, and more.
· Block Arrows: Fat arrows pointing in various directions.
· Equation Shapes: Shapes for drawing simple math equations.
· Flowchart: Various flowcharting symbols.
· Stars and Banners: Shapes that add sparkle to your presentations.
· Callouts: Text boxes and speech bubbles like those used in comic strips.
· Action Buttons: Buttons that you can add to your slides and click during a slide show to go directly to another slide or to run a macro.
Drawing a shape
The following steps explain how to draw a shape:
1. Click the Shapes button in the Illustrations group of the Insert tab.
The Shapes gallery appears.
2. Select the shape you want to insert.
When you select one of the shapes, the Shapes gallery disappears and PowerPoint is poised to draw the shape you selected.
3. Click the slide where you want the shape to appear and then drag the shape to the desired size.
Hold down the Shift key while drawing the Shape to create an evenly proportioned shape.
When you release the mouse button, the Shape object takes on the current fill color and line style.
4. (Optional) Start typing if you want the shape to contain text.
After you’ve typed your text, you can use PowerPoint’s formatting features to change its typeface, size, color, and so on. For more information, refer to Chapter 8.
Some shapes — especially the stars and banners — cry out for text. Figure 12-4 shows how you can use a star shape to add a jazzy burst to a slide.
Figure 12-4: Use a star shape to make your presentation look like a late-night infomercial.
You can change an object’s shape at any time. First, select the shape. Then, open the Drawing Tools tab on the Ribbon, look in the Insert Shapes group, click the Edit Shape button, and choose Change Shape from the menu that appears.
Many shape buttons have an extra handle shaped like a yellow diamond that enables you to adjust some aspect of the object’s shape. For example, the block arrows have a handle that enables you to increase or decrease the size of the arrowhead. The location of these handles varies depending on the shape you’re working with. Figure 12-5 shows how you can use these extra handles to vary the shapes produced by six different shapes. For each of the six shapes, the first object shows how the shape is initially drawn; the other two objects drawn with each shape show how you can change the shape by dragging the extra handle. (Note that the yellow handles aren’t shown in this figure. When you select a shape that has one of these adjustment handles, the handles will appear.)
Figure 12-5: You can create interesting variations by grabbing the extra handles on these shapes.
Drawing a polygon or free-form shape
Mr. Arnold, my seventh-grade math teacher, taught me that a polygon is a shape that has many sides and has nothing to do with having more than one spouse. (One is certainly enough for most people.) Triangles, squares, and rectangles are polygons, but so are hexagons, pentagons, and any unusual shapes whose sides all consist of straight lines. Politicians are continually inventing new polygons when they revise the boundaries of congressional districts.
One of the most useful shapes in the Shapes gallery is the Freeform Shape tool. It’s designed to create polygons, but with a twist: Not all the sides have to be straight lines. The Freeform Shape tool lets you build a shape whose sides are a mixture of straight lines and free-form curves.Figure 12-6 shows three examples of shapes that I created with the Freeform Shape tool.
Figure 12-6: Three free-form shapes.
Follow these steps to create a polygon or free-form shape:
1. 
Select the Freeform shape (shown in the margin) from the Shapes gallery.
You can find the Shapes gallery in the Shapes group on the Insert tab. When you select the Freeform Shape tool, the cursor changes to a cross-hair pointer.
2. Click where you want to position the first corner of the object.
3. Click where you want to position the second corner of the object.
4. Keep clicking wherever you want to position a corner.
5. (Optional) To draw a free-form side on the shape, hold down the mouse button when you click a corner and then drag to draw the free-form shape. When you get to the end of the free-form side, release the mouse button.
You can then click again to add more corners. Shape 3 in Figure 12-6 has one free-form side.
6. To finish the shape, click near the first corner — the one that you created in Step 2.
You don’t have to be exact. If you click anywhere near the first corner that you put down, PowerPoint assumes that the shape is finished.
You’re finished! The object assumes the line and fill color from the slide’s color scheme.
You can reshape a polygon or free-form shape by double-clicking it and then dragging any of the love handles that appear on the corners.
If you hold down the Shift key while you draw a polygon, the sides are constrained to 45-degree angles. Shape 2 in Figure 12-6 was drawn in this manner. How about a constitutional amendment requiring Congress to use the Shift key when it redraws congressional boundaries?
You also can use the Freeform Shape tool to draw a multisegmented line called an open shape. To draw an open shape, you can follow the steps in this section, except that you skip Step 6. Instead, double-click or press Esc when the line is done.
Drawing a curved line or shape
Another useful tool is the Curve Shape tool, which lets you draw curved lines or shapes. Figure 12-7 shows several examples of curved lines and shapes drawn with the Curve Shape tool.
Figure 12-7: Examples of curved lines and shapes.
Here’s the procedure for drawing a curved line or shape:
1. 
Select the Curve shape tool from the Shapes gallery.
You can find the Shapes gallery in the Shapes group on the Insert tab. When you select this tool, the cursor changes to a cross-hairs pointer.
2. Click where you want the curved line or shape to begin.
3. Click where you want the first turn in the curve to appear.
The straight line turns to a curved line, bent around the point where you clicked. As you move the mouse, the bend of the curve changes.
4. Click to add turns to the curve.
Each time you click, a new bend is added to the line. Keep clicking until the line is as twisty as you want.
5. To finish a line, double-click where you want the end of the curved line to appear. To create a closed shape, double-click over the starting point, where you clicked in Step 2.
Creating a text box
A text box is a special type of shape that’s designed to place text on your slides. To create a text box, call up the Insert tab, select the Text Box button in the Text group, and then click where you want one corner of the text box to appear and drag to where you want the opposite corner, just like you’re drawing a rectangle. When you release the mouse button, you can type text.
You can format the text that you type in the text box by highlighting the text and using the usual PowerPoint text formatting features, most of which are found on the Home tab. For more information about formatting text, see Chapter 7.
You can format the text box itself by using Shape Fill, Shape Outline, Shape Effects, and other tools available on the Drawing Tools tab, as described in the next section. By default, text boxes have no fill or line color, so the box itself is invisible on the slide — only the text is visible.
Most shapes also function as text boxes. If you want to add text to a shape, just click the shape and start typing. The text appears centered over the shape. (The only shapes that don’t accept text are lines and connectors.)
Styling Your Shapes
The center section of the Drawing Tools tab is called Shape Styles. It lets you control various stylistic features of your shapes. For example, you can set a fill color, set the outline, and add effects such as shadows or reflections.
You can set these styles individually, or you can choose one of the preselected shape styles that appears in the Shape Styles group. Note that the styles that appear in the Shape Styles group vary depending on the type of shape you’ve selected and the theme used for the presentation. For example, if you select a line, various predefined line styles are displayed. But if you select a rectangle, the styles appropriate for rectangles are displayed.
Setting the shape fill
The Shape Fill control (in the Shape Styles group of the Drawing Tools tab) lets you control how shapes are filled. The simplest type of fill is a solid color. But you can also use a picture, a gradient fill, or a texture to fill the shape. You can also use a handy Eyedropper tool that lets you set the fill of the selected object to match the fill of any other object.
Selecting solid colors, pictures, gradients, and textures for shapes is similar to setting the fill for backgrounds and themes. For more information, refer to Chapter 8.
Setting the shape outline
The Shape Outline control (in the Shape Styles group of the Drawing Tools tab) lets you change the style of line objects or the border for solid shape objects. You can change the following settings for the outline:
· Color: Sets the color used for the outline.
· Weight: Sets the thickness of the line.
· Dashes: The dashing pattern used for the lines that outline the object. The default uses a solid line, but different patterns are available to create dashed lines.
· Arrows: Lines can have an arrowhead at either or both ends. Arrowheads are used mostly on line and arc objects.
For maximum control over the outline style, choose the More command from the menu that appears when you click the Fill, Outline, or Effects button. Doing this brings up the Format Shape task pane shown in Figure 12-8. From here, you can control all aspects of a line’s style: its color, width, dash pattern, and cap type (various arrowheads can be applied).
Figure 12-8: Formatting the line style.
Applying shape effects
The Shape Effects button on the Drawing Tools tab on the Ribbon lets you apply several interesting types of effects to your shapes. When you click this button, a menu with the following effect options is displayed:
· Shadow: Applies a shadow to the picture. You can select one of several predefined shadow effects, or you can call up a dialog box that lets you customize the shadow.
· Reflection: Creates a reflected image of the picture beneath the original picture.
· Glow: Adds a glowing effect around the edges of the picture.
· Soft Edges: Softens the edges of the picture.
· Bevel: Creates a beveled effect.
· 3-D Rotation: Rotates the picture in a way that creates a three-dimensional effect.
The best way to discover how to use these effects is to experiment with them to see how they work.
Flipping and Rotating Objects
To flip an object means to create a mirror image of it. To rotate an object means to turn it about its center. PowerPoint lets you flip objects horizontally or vertically, rotate objects in 90-degree increments, or freely rotate an object to any angle.
Rotation works for text boxes and Shape text. Therefore, you can use rotation to create vertical text or text skewed to any angle you want. However, flipping an object doesn’t affect the object’s text.
Flipping an object
PowerPoint enables you to flip an object vertically or horizontally to create a mirror image of the object. To flip an object, follow these steps:
1. Select the object that you want to flip.
2. Open the Drawing Tools tab, click the Rotate button on the Arrange group, and then choose Flip Horizontal or Flip Vertical.
Rotating an object 90 degrees
You can rotate an object in 90-degree increments by following these steps:
1. Choose the object that you want to rotate.
2. 
Open the Drawing Tools tab, click the choose Rotate button on the Arrange group, and then choose Rotate Right or Rotate Left.
3. To rotate the object 180 degrees, click the appropriate Rotate button again.
Using the rotate handle
Remember how all the bad guys’ hideouts were slanted in the old Batman TV show? The rotate handle lets you give your drawings that same kind of slant. With the rotate handle, you can rotate an object to any arbitrary angle just by dragging it with the mouse.
The rotate handle is the circular handle that appears when you select an object that can be rotated. The rotate handle appears above the object, connected to the object by a line, as shown in Figure 12-9. You can rotate an object to any angle simply by dragging the rotate handle.
Figure 12-9: The rotate handle lets you rotate an object to any arbitrary angle.
The following steps show you how to use the rotate handle:
1. Click the object that you want to rotate.
2. Drag the rotate handle in the direction that you want to rotate the object.
As you drag, an outline of the object rotates around. When you get the object’s outline to the angle you want, release the mouse button, and the object is redrawn at the new angle.
To restrict the rotation angle to 15-degree increments, hold the Shift key while dragging around the rotation handle.
Drawing a Complicated Picture
When you add more than one object to a slide, you might run into several problems. What happens when the objects overlap? How do you line up objects so that they don’t look like they were thrown at the slide from a moving car? And how do you keep together objects that belong together?
The following sections show you how to use PowerPoint features to handle overlapped objects and how to align and group objects.
Changing layers
Whenever you have more than one object on a slide, the potential exists for objects to overlap one another. Like most drawing programs, PowerPoint handles this problem by layering objects like a stack of plates. The first object that you draw is at the bottom of the stack; the second object is on top of the first; the third is atop the second object; and so on. If two objects overlap, the one that’s at the highest layer wins; objects below it are partially covered. (Note that PowerPoint’s layers aren’t nearly as powerful as layers in other programs, such as Adobe Illustrator or AutoCAD. All they really do is set the stacking order when objects are placed on top of one another.)
So far, so good — but what if you don’t remember to draw the objects in the correct order? What if you draw a shape that you want to tuck behind a shape that you’ve already drawn, or what if you want to bring an existing shape to the top of the pecking order? No problem. PowerPoint enables you to change the stacking order by moving objects toward the front or back so that they overlap just the way you want.
The Drawing Tools tab provides two controls that let you move an object forward or backward in the layer order:
· Bring to Front: Brings the chosen object to the top of the stack. Note that this button has a down arrow next to it. If you click this down arrow, you reveal a menu with two subcommands: Bring to Front and Bring Forward. The Bring Forward command moves the object just one step closer to the top of the heap, whereas the Bring to Front command moves the object all the way to the top.
· Send to Back: Sends the chosen object to the back of the stack. Again, this button has a down arrow next to it. You can click this down arrow to access the Send Backward subcommand, which sends the object one level down in the layer order.
Layering problems are most obvious when objects have a fill color. If an object has no fill color, objects behind it are allowed to show through. In this case, the layering doesn’t matter much.
To bring an object to the top of another, you might have to use the Bring Forward command several times. The reason is that even though the two objects appear to be adjacent, other objects might occupy the layers between them.
Line ’em up
Nothing looks more amateurish than objects dropped randomly on a slide with no apparent concern for how they line up with each other. The Drawing Tools tab includes an Align button that brings up a menu with the following commands:
· Align Left
· Align Center
· Align Right
· Align Top
· Align Middle
· Align Bottom
· Distribute Horizontally
· Distribute Vertically
The first three commands (Align Left, Center, and Right) align items horizontally; the next three commands (Align Top, Middle, and Bottom) align items vertically.
You can also distribute several items so that they’re spaced evenly. Select the items that you want to distribute, click the Draw button, choose Align or Distribute, and then choose Distribute Horizontally or Distribute Vertically. PowerPoint then adjusts the spacing of the objects that appear between the two outermost objects selected.
Another quick way to align one item to another is to simply drag the first item until it is close to the alignment you want. When the item reaches the correct alignment, a magic guideline will appear to indicate that you have found the correct alignment. If you release the mouse button while this magic guideline is visible, the object will be snapped into alignment.
Using the grids and guides
To help you create well-ordered slides, PowerPoint lets you display a grid of evenly spaced lines over the slide. These lines aren’t actually a part of the slide, so your audience won’t see them when you give your presentation. They exist simply to make the task of lining things up a bit easier.
In addition to the grid, PowerPoint also lets you use guides. The guides are two lines — one horizontal, the other vertical — that appear onscreen. Although the gridlines are fixed in their location on your slides, you can move the guides around as you want. Any object that comes within a pixel’s breadth of one of these guidelines snaps to it. Like the grid, the guides don’t show up when you give your presentation. They appear only when you’re editing your slides. Guides are a great way to line up objects in a neat row.
To display the grid or guides, click the dialog box launcher in the bottom-right corner of the Show section of the View tab on the Ribbon. This click summons the Grid and Guides dialog box, shown in Figure 12-10.
Figure 12-10: The Grid and Guides dialog box.
To activate the grid, select the Snap Objects to Grid check box and then adjust the grid spacing to whatever setting you want. If you want to actually see the grid onscreen, select the Display Grid on Screen check box.
To fire up the guides, select the Display Drawing Guides on Screen check box. After the guides are visible, you can move them around the slide by clicking and dragging them.
You can also deselect Display Smart Guides When Shapes Are Aligned to disable the guidelines that appear when you move shapes into alignment with each other. This is a useful feature, however; I recommend that you leave this option selected.
Group therapy
A group is a collection of objects that PowerPoint treats as though they were one object. Using groups properly is one key to putting simple shapes together to make complex pictures without becoming so frustrated that you have to join a therapy group. (“Hello, my name is Doug, and PowerPoint drives me crazy.”)
To create a group, follow these steps:
1. Choose all objects that you want to include in the group.
You can do this by holding down the Shift key and clicking each of the items or by clicking and dragging the resulting rectangle around all the items.
2. Right-click one of the selected objects and then choose Group ⇒ Group from the menu that appears.
You can also find the Group command on the Drawing Tools tab, but it’s much easier to find by right-clicking.
To take a group apart so that PowerPoint treats the objects as individuals again, follow these steps:
1. Right-click the group you want to break up.
2. Choose Group ⇒ Ungroup.
If you create a group and then ungroup it so that you can work on its elements individually, you can easily regroup the objects. These steps show you how:
1. Right-click one of the objects that was in the original group.
2. Choose Group ⇒ Regroup.
PowerPoint remembers which objects were in the group and automatically includes them.
PowerPoint enables you to create groups of groups. This capability is useful for complex pictures because it enables you to work on one part of the picture, group it, and then work on the next part of the picture without worrying about accidentally disturbing the part that you’ve already grouped. After you have several such groups, select them and group them. You can create groups of groups of groups and so on, ad nauseam.