Essential drawing tools I
June 15th, 2005
A selection of drawing tools that are frequently used and should be kept accessible is shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3. Essential drawing commands arranged in Drawing toolbar.
Curve, Freeform and Scribble. Using Freeform and Curve is very similar: freeform draws straight lines and curve draws curved lines. Click the Curve button to activate it, within the slide area click the mouse again to start dragging the mouse pointer and drawing. Each subsequent click produces a turning point within the line. Double click ends the drawing process. You can switch between curved and straight line (segment) types very easily using edit points command as described later.
Free rotate. This tool is very useful for manually turning objects around by clicking and dragging in a circular motion any of the four green circles that appear around the selected object after activation of free rotate. To have more control over rotating the object by the smallest degree possible, use Format AutoShape dialog box (activated from Format menu), select Size tab and then fill in a desired rotation degree number (1 to 360) in Rotation box.
Edit points. After creating a line or object with freeform, curve or scribble tools, you can edit the shape of the object using Edit points tool. First activate the object you want to edit and click on the edit points tool. Each point that has been generated during drawing process will show up as small black rectangle (to distinguish from an object that is just selected and visualized by open circles around it). More on this very useful tool in upcoming articles.
Crop. Crop tool may be the more frequently image processing tool you will use in PowerPoint, of course in addition to image resizing. First select the image (e.g. microscope picture) you previously inserted in your slide and then click the crop tool to activate side and corner handles for cropping. Make sure that Snap object to grid box is un-selected (View menu > Grid and Guides) so you can crop the image by the smallest area possible. Drag the handle toward the inside of the picture to crop it. Note that the cropped information is not lost, you can later reverse partially or completely the process and return to the original size.
Rotate tools. Rotate or flip are simple, extremely useful and very frequently used tools in almost any slide.
Group and Ungroup. These very important tools let you build and manage complex objects that consist of many simpler and smaller sub-objects. For example, when you create cell membrane you first draw small circles and lines and than assemble them into a string of objects that form membrane. Grouping them allows you to treat this assemble of sometimes tens of different objects, as a single object to copy, move, etc.
Bring to Front and Send to Back. These tools are indispensable to create the perception of depth and sometimes quite convincing 3D-like effects.
Align tools. These tools are very often used when building more complex biological objects, where alignment and symmetry is critical.
Distribute tools. As align tools, these tools are indispensable for creating perfectly spaced multi-component objects.