This PowerPoint Autoshapes tutorial will demonstrate how to work with drawing tools called PowerPoint AutoShapes; how to create and modify them, add text, fills, and borders.
PowerPoint AutoShapes
To emphasize important points in your presentation, you might want to include PowerPoint autoshapes in addition to text. The Shapes you draw in PowerPoint are objects that can be sized, moved, copied, and formatted in a variety of ways to suit your needs.
PowerPoint provides several tools for creating several types of shapes including arrows, banners, stars, rounded rectangles, circles, squares, and more. Shapes can be worked with individually or they can be grouped and treated as one shape.
To create almost any shape in PowerPoint, you click on a tool from the Drawing toolbar or from the PowerPoint AutoShapes menu and then drag in the location where you want the shape to appear.
After you draw a shape, it is surrounded by a set of handles, indicating that it is selected. If it becomes deselected, you can click on any visible part of the shape to reselect it.
The handles around a selected shape have the following purposes:
Sizing handles - The white handles around the shape used to change the size of the shape.
Adjustment handles - If a shape has a yellow-diamond shaped adjustment handle next to one of the sizing handles, the shape is adjustable. You can use this handle to alter the appearance of the shape without changing its size.
Rotating handle - The green rotating handle is used to adjust the angle of rotation of the shape.
Changing the Way a Shape Looks
You can change the look of a shape by changing its attributes. A shape could have graphic attributes such as fill, line, and shadow or text attributes such as style, font, color, and shadow. The shapes you draw usually only have a fill and a border until you apply other attributes to the shape.
Tools for changing the basic attributes of a shape - fill color, border-line color and thickness, and text color are located on the Drawing toolbar
You can change the appearance of a shape in many ways.
Change the Fill Color or Add Fill Effects
Change color - select from standard color palette or custom colors
Add a texture - choose from Fill Effects, Textures
Add a gradient fill - choose from Fill Effects, Gradient
Add a pattern - choose from Fill Effects, Pattern
Add a picture - choose from Fill Effects, Picture
Color Fill Effects
Add a one or two color or a preset gradient fill
Modify the transparency of the fill
Vary the direction and shape of the gradient fill.
Texture Fill Effect
Fill a shape with a texture. Select from those provided by PowerPoint or use Other Texture to supply your own.
Pattern Fill Effects
Add a pattern and modify it with foreground and background colors.
Picture Fill Effects
Fill the shape with a photograph. Choose the Picture Tab and then click on the Select Picture button.
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