Leveraging SmartArt™ Graphics in the 2007 Microsoft® Office System: Using Office 2007’s New Business Diagramming Tools

Chapter 11. Shapes

Although SmartArt Graphics is the shiny new feature in Microsoft Office, the Shapes tools are actually far more mature and far more flexible. Most of the formatting features discussed for SmartArt Graphics applies to shapes. You can apply glow, shadow, reflection, fills, bevel, and 3-D rotation.

In previous versions of Office, this feature was called AutoShapes. In Office 2007, the Shapes tools are simply shapes and are accessed through the Insert ribbon in Excel, through Word, and the Insert or Home ribbons in PowerPoint.

Following are some of the advantages of using shapes:

• A shape can have text that comes from a calculated value in a cell. This is very powerful and is the main limitation of SmartArt Graphics. For details, ...