Drawing Toolbar

Menu: Draw

The Draw menu has commands for managing your objects. These commands can be used on Drawing objects, AutoShapes, clip art, pictures, and placeholders.

Change shape: You must use the Change AutoShape command to change the shape of an existing AutoShape, text box, or placeholder. Not a obvious place to look for such a command!
 

Button: Select Object

The Select Object button changes the mouse pointer to the Select shape.

When the pointer has the Select Object shape, you can select objects on a slide by clicking them. The pointer will drag a rectangle shape that will select all of the objects that are totally inside the rectangle.

Menu: AutoShapes

The AutoShape menu opens a list of categories of AutoShapes. Each category opens a palette of shapes.
 

Lines		Connectors
Basic Shapes		Block Arrows
FlowChart		Stars & Banners
Callouts		Action Buttons

The Action Buttons category is special to PowerPoint. It contains buttons that you can add to your slides as hyperlinks, leading to another slide or a custom show or a Web page or a file, like a sound file or video.

Buttons: Basic Shapes

The 4 most commonly used AutoShapes have their own buttons: Line, Arrow, Rectangle, and Oval. Click the button for the shape you want and then drag on the slide.

Helpful key combo:

• Square: hold the SHIFT key down while dragging a rectangle.
• Circle: hold the SHIFT key down while dragging an oval.
• Horizontal or vertical line or arrow: hold the SHIFT key down while dragging.

Button: Text Box

The Text Box button lets you create a rectangle that is ready for you to type in text. The borders will vanish when you exit the text box.

A text box is not a placeholder, so the text in a text box does not show in the outline.

Add AutoShape to a text box: On the Drawing toolbar, choose  Draw  |  Change AutoShape  and then pick a shape from the palettes. The shape fits inside the existing text box, but it will not show until you format the lines or fill. Confusing!

Text box after changing AutoShape to Heart

Add text to an existing AutoShape: Right click the AutoShape and choose  Add Text  from the popup menu. A text box surrounds the AutoShape and the cursor appears for you to start typing.
 

Button: WordArt

The WordArt button opens the WordArt Gallery, which contains a number of a pre-designed formats for your text.

Use a WordArt style as your starting point for designing fancy titles and logos.

Afterwards you can modify the formatting with the WordArt toolbar.

Button: Diagram

The Diagram button opens the Diagram Gallery, which has several standard diagrams and organizational charts.

Once you pick a diagram type, PowerPoint inserts the default version on the slide. Then you can modify it using the Diagram or Organization Chart toolbar.

In previous versions of Microsoft Office, this feature was a separate program.

Button: Clip Art

The Clip Art button opens the Insert Clip Art task pane. You can search your clip art collections or the Internet, based on the file name or on keywords associated with the clip.
 

Or you can open the Clip Organizer program with a link at the bottom of the pane and browse though your clip art.

Button: Picture

The Picture button opens the Insert Picture dialog so you can browse your drives to find the image that you want to use.

By default the dialog opens to the Sample Pictures folder which shows thumbnails of the images.

In WinXP you can make other folders show thumbnails of images also. On the toolbar for the dialog or folder window, click the arrow beside the Folder Views button and choose Thumbnails. TaDa!
 

Buttons:
Colors- Fill, Line, Font

The Colors buttons apply the color in the bar at the bottom of the button to what you have selected.  You can change the fill color, line color, and font color.

Clicking the arrow at the right of a button opens a palette that shows the colors in the current Color Scheme. Below those colors are any colors you have selected yourself previously. You can find more colors by clicking the More Colors... link.
 

The palette will be grayed out if nothing is selected or if the selected item cannot be formatted with the button you clicked.
 

Buttons:
Styles - Lines, Dashes, Arrows

The styling of your lines and borders can be changed with buttons on the Drawing bar. Clicking one of these buttons opens a palette of styling choices.

Line Style
Dash Style
Arrow Style

The palettes are grayed out if you do not have an object selected that can be styled in this way.

Button: Shadow

The Shadow Style button opens a palette of choices for applying a drop shadow to the selected object or text. It automatically picks a shadow color that contrasts with the text.

For even more choices, the Shadow Settings link opens a toolbar. You can adjust the direction, distance, and color of the shadow.

Confusion - two Shadow buttons:

• Effects: Only 1 - a subtle shadow down and to the right
• Applied to:  Selected text
   

• Effects: Several to choose from
• Applied to: Objects, like placeholder, text box, AutoShape, or image, and sometimes to all the text in an object
• If object has fill: Shadow effect applies to whole object like the oval at the right.
   
• If object does not have fill: Shadow effect applies to all the text in the object, like two text examples at the right, each with a different shadow effect

Button: 3-D Style

The 3-D Style button opens a palette of choices for turning your object into a 3-dimensional shape.

The 3-D Settings... link at the bottom of the palette opens a toolbar that lets you control the tilt, depth, direction, lighting, surface type, and 3-D color of your object.
 

Initial oval and 3-D

If the palette is grayed out, then the selected object cannot be turned into a 3-D object.
 

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