Office 2013 In Depth

Using Shapes and the Office Drawing Tools

The Microsoft Office applications enable you to add a variety of shapes to your Office documents. The Shapes gallery, which you access via the Shapes command on the Insert tab, provides shape categories. You can add lines, rectangles, block arrows, callouts, and other shape types.

One of the available shapes is a text box, which, as its name implies, adds a box containing text to a document. However, other shapes can also contain text; this means that you can use any shape as a design element and get double duty out of it as a text container. This can be useful when you want to add text to a document but also want to add some visual interest—say, in a Word document or a PowerPoint slide. You format the ...