Chapter 23: Enhancing Your Work with Pictures and Drawings
In This Chapter
Inserting and customizing Shapes
Getting 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.
On the Web
Most of the examples in this chapter are available at this book's website.
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 simple diagrams, display text, or just add some visual appeal to a worksheet.
Keep in mind that Shapes can add unnecessary clutter to a worksheet. Perhaps the best advice is to use Shapes sparingly. Ideally, Shapes can help draw attention to some aspect of your worksheet. They shouldn't be the main attraction.
Inserting a Shape
You can add a Shape to a worksheet's draw layer by choosing Insert ⇒ Illustrations ⇒ Shapes, which opens the Shapes gallery, ...
