Office 2011 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

Chapter 22. Making the Most of Graphics and Media

Office comes with Word for text, Excel for numbers, PowerPoint for slides, and Outlook for email and scheduling. From reading the box, you might conclude that Office is therefore missing one of the cornerstone Macintosh features—graphics software.

In fact, however, Office comes with a herd of graphics tools, including Office 2011’s SmartArt graphics, the Clip Art Browser, AutoShapes, WordArt, and more—built right in and shared among Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. As is almost always the case with Office, there’s more than one way to open the same window or widget, and in the case of graphics, multiple tools seem remarkably similar. For instance, what’s the difference between the Clip Art Gallery and the Clip Art Browser? For that matter, how is the Clip Art Browser different from the Media Browser? Should you look for your artwork in the media browser or the scrapbook? This section answers these and many other questions about popping artwork into your documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and email.

Inserting a Graphic or Media Clip

You can drag, paste, or insert pictures, drawings, and media clips into a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document. The launch pad for any of these is the Media Browser, a tabbed window. If you have the Standard toolbar showing, the quickest way to open the media browser is by clicking the Show or Hide Media Browser button. As shown in Figure 22-1, the button’s icon shows musical notes, a movie clip and a picture. ...