chapter 18: the graphics programs of office x 635
chapter
18
O
ffice comes with Word for text, Excel for numbers, PowerPoint for slides,
and Entourage for email and scheduling. From reading the box, you might
conclude that Office is therefore missing one of the cornerstone Macintosh
programs: graphics software.
In fact, however, Office comes with a minor army of graphics programs. Microsoft
Graph, Equation Editor, Clip Gallery, AutoShapes, WordArt, and other tools are built
right in and shared among Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. (They’re not available in
Entourage.)
Because they take advantage of the Mac OS X Quartz drawing technology, these
programs produce better results than ever in Office X. The benefits include smoother
(antialiased) lines and new transparency effects.
Inserting a Graphic
You can drag, paste, or insert a picture into a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document.
To insert a graphic, choose InsertPicture (or click the Insert Picture button on the
Drawing toolbar) and then choose one of the following from the submenu:
Clip Art opens the Office Clip Gallery, as described below.
• From File opens a dialog box where you can choose any graphics file on your
Mac.
Horizontal Line (Word only) is a quick way to put a horizontal line between
paragraphs without opening the Borders and Shading dialog box. These lines are
The Graphics
Programs of Office X
636 office x for macintosh: the missing manual
actually GIF files. They’re more decorative than standard lines and borders, and
ideal for use on Web sites (see Chapter 7).
AutoShapes are an expanded, elaborate version of the familiar circles and squares
that you create with drawing tools. For instance, AutoShapes include arrows, cubes,
banners, and talking balloons (see page 540).
Organization Chart opens Microsoft Organization Chart, a specialized mini-pro-
gram that creates corporate charts showing how executives, managers, and assis-
tants relate to one another (see page 663).
•WordArt allows you to change the look of text in a number of wacky, attention-
getting ways. After typing the text, you can stretch, color, and distort it, using
Offices drawing tools (page 540).
From Scanner or Camera lets you import directly from one of these devices con-
nected to your Mac—sometimes. Its success depends on your model of digital
camera or scanner.
Chart (Word only) creates a chart from any Excel file on your Mac. (Of course,
you can use Excel charts in PowerPoint, too. But in PowerPoint, the command is
right on the Insert menu, not on the Picture submenu. See Chapter 13 for details
on charts.)
Microsoft Word Table (PowerPoint only) opens a dialog box to start building a
spreadsheet-like table (see page 589).
Inserting a
Graphic
Pictures and Drawings
There are two distinct kinds of graphics in the computer
world, which, in Office, are known as pictures and draw-
ings.
Pictures include bitmap files, raster graphics, painting files,
JPEG or GIF images, photographs, anything scanned or
captured with a digital camera, anything grabbed from a
Web page, and Office clip art. What all pictures have in
common is that (a) they’re composed of individual, tiny
colored dots, and (b) you can’t create them using the tools
built into Office. You can make pictures larger or smaller,
but if you stretch something larger than original size, it
may look blotchy.
Drawings include AutoShapes, Word Art, and any graph-
ics you create using Office’s own drawing tools. Drawings,
also known as vector or object-oriented graphics, are stored
by the Mac as mathematical equations that describe their
size, shape, and other characteristics. That’s a fancy way of
saying that you can resize, rotate, squish, or squeeze draw-
ings as much as you like without ever worrying that they’ll
print jagged or blotchy.
Keeping these distinctions in mind may help you under-
stand why your Office programs function like they do when
you work with graphics.
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