Chapter 10: Creating Spiffy Graphics

Overview

Microsoft Office Excel 2007 gives you the tools to create a variety of graphic objects-boxes, lines, circles, ovals, arcs, freeform polygons, text boxes, buttons, and a wide assortment of complex predefined shapes, clip art, and the new SmartArt graphics. If you already have graphics created in other programs, Office Excel 2007 imports those graphics as well. Throughout this chapter, you'll learn how to add graphics to worksheets, but you can also use many of the same kinds of effects when creating charts. First we'll discuss creating and inserting various kinds of graphic objects, and then we'll cover formatting and working with them.

Most of your graphic adventures will begin using the buttons and menus found on the Insert tab on the Ribbon, shown in Figure 10-1.

Figure 10-1: The Insert tab contains most of the drawing tools.

For more information about charts, see Part 6, "Creating Charts."