Office X for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

chapter 18: the graphics programs of office x 657

Picture Tab (Picture Objects Only)

The tools on the Picture tab, as shown in Figure 18-6, provide a great deal of control

over how your image looks. For example:

• Use the Crop from boxes to specify, in hundredths of an inch, how much you’d

like to trim off each side of a picture. (There’s a crop tool on the Picture toolbar,

of course, but it doesn’t permit this kind of numerical accuracy.)

• The Color menu lets you turn your color graphic into grayscale, black and white,

or watermark. (The watermark setting produces an extremely faint image, light

enough that you can still read text that flows over it. Of course, you can do the

same thing using the Transparency slider on the Colors and Lines tab).

These choices affect only the image itself, not the fill. You adjust the fill on the

Colors and Lines tab as described above.

• Brightness and Contrast are mainly useful for touching up photographs, but

they do affect clip art and other images. Increase brightness and contrast for a

crisper look; decrease them for a softer effect.

If you change your mind about anything you’ve done to a picture, remember you

can undo your changes one by one by choosing the Edit→Undo command. Or, to

start all over again, click the Reset button here; this will restore your picture to its

original, pristine condition.

Position Tab (PowerPoint Only)

The Format dialog box offers this tab only in PowerPoint. Its simple controls let you

specify exactly where your graphic appears on the slide, relative to the center or

corner of the slide.

Protection and Properties Tabs (Excel Only)

You can lock a graphic independently of the other spreadsheet elements, preventing

anyone who doesn’t have the password from deleting or modifying it. That’s the

purpose of the Protection tab’s sole checkbox. (As noted in the dialog box, however,

you must still lock the spreadsheet itself as a next step; see page 524.)

The Properties tab controls how your graphic should respond when you move or

resize the spreadsheet cells on which it lies. That is, it determines whether or not the

graphic should move or resize in kind. It also offers a “Print object” checkbox that, if

turned off, renders your object invisible in printouts.

The Picture Toolbar

The Format Picture dialog box described in the previous pages may be overrun with

features, but when it comes to touching up pictures (scans, JPEG images, Office clip

art, and so on), it’s only the beginning. The Picture toolbar, which appears auto-

matically when you click a picture, offers many more ways to dress up your images.

(You can also summon it by choosing View→Toolbar→Picture. And by the way,

Formatting

Pictures & Drawings