Excel® 2010 Bible

Chapter 22. Enhancing Your Work with Pictures and Drawings

IN THIS CHAPTER

Inserting and customizing Shapes

An overview of SmartArt and WordArt

Working with other types of graphics

When it comes to visual presentation, Excel has a lot more up its sleeve than charts. As you may know, you can insert a wide variety of graphics into your worksheet to add pizzazz to an otherwise boring report.

This chapter describes the non–chart-related graphic tools available in Excel. These tools consist of Shapes, SmartArt, WordArt, and imported or pasted images. In addition to enhancing your worksheets, you'll find that working with these objects can be a nice diversion. When you need a break from crunching numbers, you might enjoy creating an artistic masterpiece using Excel's graphic tools.

NOTE

Most of the examples in this chapter are available on the companion CD-ROM.

22.1. Using Shapes

Microsoft Office, including Excel, provides access to a variety of customizable graphic images known as Shapes. You might want to insert shapes to create diagrams, store text, or just add some visual appeal to a worksheet.

22.1.1. Inserting a Shape

You can add a Shape to a worksheet's draw layer by choosing Insert Illustrations Shapes, which opens the Shapes gallery, shown in Figure 22.1. Shapes are organized ...