Editing SmartArt Text

All SmartArt has text placeholders, which are basically text boxes. You simply click in one of them and type. Then use the normal text-formatting controls (Font, Font Size, Bold, Italic, and so on) on the Home tab to change the appearance of the text, or use the WordArt Styles group on the Format tab to apply WordArt formatting.

You can also display a text pane, as you saw in Figure 11.1, and type or edit the diagram's text there. The text pane serves the same purpose for a diagram that the Outline pane serves for the slide as a whole.

Caution 

The text in the outline pane is not always in the order you would expect it to be for the diagram because it forces text to appear in linear form from a diagram that is not necessarily linear. It does not matter how the text appears in the text pane because only you see that. What matters is how it looks in the actual diagram.

Here are some tips for working with diagram text:

• To leave a text box empty, just don't type anything in it. The Click to add text words do not show up in a printout or in Slide Show view.

• To promote a line of text, press Shift+Tab; to demote it, press Tab in the text pane.

• Text wraps automatically, but you can press Shift+Enter to insert a line break if needed.

• In most cases, the text size shrinks to fit the graphic in which it is located. There are some exceptions to that, though; for example, at the top of a pyramid, the text can overflow the tip of the pyramid.

• All of the text is the same size, so if you enter a really long string of text in one box, the text size in all of the related boxes shrinks too. You can manually format parts of the diagram to change this behavior, as you will learn later in the chapter.

• If you resize the diagram, its text resizes automatically.

Note 

In PowerPoint 2003, you could not move shapes around in a diagram by default because AutoLayout was enabled. You don't have that problem in PowerPoint 2007 with SmartArt, though; you can select and move individual parts of the diagram freely, as you would any shapes.