Exploring Office 2007: Working with Shapes in Office 2007 Using Shapes in Excel, PowerPoint and Word 2007 Helen Bradley
Like a lot of the graphic content in Office 2007, Shapes have been given a makeover. While it might appear that Shapes are a poor second cousin to the new SmartArt feature, this is not the case.
There are things you can do with Shapes that you can't do with SmartArt, such as creating composite images, and logos and shapes can also display pictures and the contents of an Excel cell. For this reason, Shapes deserve their place in your Office toolkit alongside SmartArt.
Let's look at some of the ways you can use shapes in your documents and worksheets and some of the myriad of formatting options available for shapes.
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Shape Basics
To view the Shapes collection in an Office document, click Insert > Shapes. The palette that opens displays the shapes available in this application. To make a shape, click the shape to use and drag to draw it on the document.
Shapes have a green rotate handle that you can drag on to rotate the shape around its axis. If you hold the Shift key as you rotate it, the shape will rotate in 15 degree increments.
Some Shapes also have yellow diamond shape markers that allow you to adjust aspects of the shape. For example, on the shape which is a square with a folded corner, the yellow diamond lets you adjust the depth of the fold. The diamonds on other shapes let you, for example, change the arc of a circle, the size of an arrow head or the point of a teardrop.
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Freeform Shapes
In the Lines collection are a series of shapes you draw yourself: the Curve, Freeform and Scribble. Use the Scribble shape to draw a shape such as a spiral line — just click and drag to draw it.
The Freeform shape creates a polygonal shape which can also have drawn edges. To use it, click the shape then, to create a polygon click once at each corner of the shape and straight lines will appear between the points. Double click over the starting point to close the shape or simply double click to create an open shape.
You can mix straight and drawn sides by dragging with the mouse button when you want a drawn side and click when you want a straight line,
The Curve shape lets you create Bezier curves. To do this click once where the curve is to start and then again where the top of the curve should be. Click again to anchor the next part of the curve or double click to finish it at this point.
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Shapes in Excel and PowerPoint
Excel and PowerPoint both support the new tools for working with Shapes so the techniques which follow work in these programs, but many do not work the same way in Word. Once a shape has been created you can click the shape to select it. When you do, the Drawing Tools option appears on the ribbon — it appears only when a shape is selected.
Included in the Drawing Tools collection is the Insert Shapes tool so you can easily add another shape to your workspace without having to return to the Insert tab on the Ribbon to do so. Once you have drawn a shape, you can adjust it by clicking Drawing Tools > Format > Edit Shape > Edit Points.
You will see the nodes appear on the shape and the handles that form the curves. Drag on the node to move it and drag on the handles to adjust the amount and direction of the curve.
Shapes like rectangles and arrows aren't freeform shapes so they don't display nodes by default. However you can convert these shapes to freeform shapes by choosing Drawing Tools > Format > Edit Shape > Convert to Freeform. Then, you can use the Edit Shape > Edit Points option to adjust the shape.
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Shapes and Themes
Shapes can be formatted using the options which are included in the currently selected Theme. To do this, choose Drawing Tools > Format > Shape Styles and select a style to apply to the current shape.
If you later change the Theme of the document, worksheet, or presentation, the shapes will change formatting automatically to match the Theme colors. You can further customize the shape's fill by choosing a Shape Style and then choose Shape Fill and choose a fill color from the color palette.
You can also fill a shape with a picture by selecting Picture from the Shape Fill dropdown list. Select the image to use to fill the shape from the files on your disk, click Insert and the photo or other image will fill the shape.
Likewise you can choose a gradient fill from the Gradients list or create your own gradient. To do this click the More Gradients button and, if you're using Word 2007 you'll see the dialog you're used to using to format fill effects. In PowerPoint and Excel a new Format Shape dialog appears crammed full of all sorts of new and improved features.
