PowerPoint Ninja/Chapter 7

From KMWiki

7. Drawing One of the things you will often be doing in PowerPoint is drawing. Now, PowerPoint is not the world’s best drawing tool – which is probably a good thing, because those of us that use it are not the world’s best graphic artists. In fact, most of us would be handsomely confused if we tried to use advanced drawing and graphics software like Adobe’s Illustrator and Photoshop. Having said that, however, there is still a range of useful drawing tools that are made available in PowerPoint, and with some basic principles all of us can create understandable and actionable charts and diagrams. Standards in relation to font and lines and treatment of objects when drawing

The basics: lines and boxes Drawing lines and boxes is easy – merely click on the line or box button in the drawing toolbar, and then click and drag in your presentation where you want the line or box to appear. When you are drawing lines, holding the left shift key down while you draw keeps the line vertical, horizontal, and 5 angles in between centered on 45 degrees, depending upon where you drag the end of the line to. When you are drawing boxes (or any other shapes), holding the left shift key down keeps the box as a square rather than a rectangle (or circle etc rather than an oval). Positioning lines and boxes on the page Aligning lines Nudge Guidelines

Line connectors Selecting multiple objects Avoid diagonal lines

Drawing

Autoshapes and angles

Properties of a box or shape Line thickness Interior Fill Fill effects

Effective line thickness – go thin Nudging options – draw in large view so you can see what you are doing, snap to shape Dealing with layers Selecting multiple objects

Ungrouping autoshapes

Conceptual autoshapes – the additional ones

Use of fills in color presentations Colors that work: white out of red, white out of blue etc Matching colors

Working in a bigger scale to make sure lines work