Office 2013 Digital Classroom

PowerPoint Lesson 4: Using Tables, Charts, and SmartArt

On a slide seen from across the room, a picture is worth a lot more than a thousand words. This lesson introduces a variety of tools to turn text and raw data into elegant, customizable visuals.

What you’ll learn in this lesson:

• • Transforming bulleted lists into diagrams and charts
• • Automatically fitting custom art to an existing document theme
• • Adding visual emphasis by styling individual SmartArt pieces
• • Linking charts in a slide show to live external data

Starting up

You will work with files from the PPT04lessons folder. Make sure that you have loaded the OfficeLessons folder onto your hard drive from www.digitalclassroombooks.com/Office2013. If you need further instructions, see “Loading lesson files” in the Starting up section of this book.

Giving structure to your content

Tables, charts, and SmartArt occupy a middle ground between straight text and graphics: tables and SmartArt turn structured text content into styled visuals, while charts represent relationships between data points with shapes and colors. Tables can also be used to fit an entire slide’s layout to a grid, turning cell text into a visual element.

In this lesson, you’ll build slides around tabular data, format structured text as editable SmartArt, and transform spreadsheet data into graphs and charts. You’ll also link a chart to an Excel document ...