Inserting Shapes in PowerPoint 2016
During this Microsoft PowerPoint 2016 training tutorial video, we will demonstrate the process of inserting shapes into your PowerPoint slides. These shapes can be lines, rectangles, block arrows, equation shapes, flowchart, stars and banners, callouts, and action buttons. We will also show you how to customize these shapes like typing some text inside an object.
Okay so we’ve made it down to module five now and this is where we’re going to talk a lot about how to add graphics to your presentation.
Now this is section one where we’re going to talk about inserting shapes but let me just mention that graphics might be a picture you’ve inserted, it could be a star that you drew, it could be some kind of cartoon picture you got from the internet. All of that’s considered a graphic and I wanted to show you how to add each one of those to your presentation and then we’ll talk about working with them a little bit later.
Okay so we’re back in our presentation we’ve been working with and what I want to do now is show you how to add a new slide that’s going to be blank so that we can actually insert some shapes. Now remember new slides are always the next slide so I’m clicked on the third slide and I’m going to New Slide and this time I’m going to pick the blank layout.
Now this ones pretty blank. The only background graphic it actually has on it is this little thing right up here. And it wouldn’t hurt us to leave it there but just something real quick I want to show you. Sometimes you might be working with designs or templates that have a lot of background graphics going on. And if you want to draw and add graphics or shapes to those you can actually take the background graphics off so it doesn’t look quite so busy. Here’s how you do that.
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If you went up to the Design tab and you go all the way to the right of your ribbon you’ll see a button that says Format Background. Now there’s a lot of different things you can do here. We’ll be getting into all of this later. But do you see this little checkbox here, Hide background graphics from master? You’ll notice when you check it that little thing is gone from there.
So you don’t have to worry about it now. But notice it’s still on the other slides if you look over here. If you wanted to take it off of all of your slides notice there is an Apply to all at the bottom. But as long as you don’t check that, as long as you just check this one here and you close then you’ll notice this one does not have the background graphics so it’s a little bit easier to work with.
Okay so let me show you how to insert shapes. Now I’m going to go back to the Home tab and I want you to notice that you have a Drawing grouping right here and these are your shapes. You’re going to see these same shapes on several different tabs. So you don’t always have to come back to the Home tab to draw these. Matter of fact if you went up to the Insert tab you’re going to see shapes right here. So you can use the shapes from wherever you happen to find them.
Now shapes are just different things that you draw and I want to show you how they’re set up because they’re set up by categories to make it easier for you to find something you’re looking for. Now what they do put at the top here are your recently used shapes. So if you wanted to go back to one a little more easily you can find it there. But notice they’ve got it broken down by lines.
They’ve got rectangles, basic shapes which has things like smiley faces and lightning bolts and things in there. They’ve got block arrows. So if you needed arrows of any kind. They’ve got equation shapes that have to do with math. Flow chart shapes and then stars and banners.
Now the callouts down here at the bottom these are, if you think about the comics on Sunday where they have the little piece out to the side with the words that the person was saying, that’s what that is.
And then let me just mention the Action buttons. These are hyperlinks. So if you wanted to be able to click a button and move to an Excel file, for example, or click a button and go to a particular slide you can do that. We’re going to talk about Action buttons in another module so just kind of hold that thought.
Now let’s go back up to the top where the lines are so I can show you something easy.
Let me show you how to actually draw any shape. I’m just going to start with a basic line. Notice I’m going to click the line and then my mouse looks like this black crosshairs. So I’m just going to hold the mouse the whole time and draw my line. Wherever I let go that’s where the lines going to stop.
Now you’re going to notice that because this is an object it has the control handles on either side like we’ve been talking about. So if you deselect by clicking away and then you can click back on the object to select it again.
Now let’s go back up and look at some other shapes. I’m going to go back to Shapes over here. Now you’ll notice it’s in a different place this time because you’re actually on what Office calls a contextual tab. Because I clicked on my object I have a new Drawing Tools contextual tab that has options just for this line I drew. If I click away from this notice I would have to go back to Home or Insert to access that list of shapes again.
Now when you’re looking under lines you’re going to see some of these squiggly lines here. And some of these are just ways to freely draw something. So you’ll notice that this one is scribble. If I click on that I can just randomly scribble or draw something here. It does take a little bit of practice though.
Notice also objects can layer on top of others. See how this one happens to be on top of this one? And we’re going to talk about that a little bit later too but right now we’re just drawing. Alright.
Let me go ahead and click on the squiggly line here and I’m just going to hit Delete on the keyboard to get rid of it.
Okay so let me go back to Insert, Shapes. Now you have rectangles which are the next set of shapes. So notice that you can draw any of these rectangles that you would like. Another shape that I’m going to have are under basic shapes. You’ve got things like the smiley face. A lot of people like this old smiley face right here. Or you might have seen the lightning bolt. See that?
Okay so then we talked about you’ve got arrows. I’m not going to draw all of these. But if you were going to draw a block arrow it would look something like this. You could make it point wherever you like.
I mentioned you have equations, you have flow charts, and then stars and banners. I want to mention a couple things.
I’m going to draw the star that has a 16 inside of it, that’s a 16 point star, because I want to show you something with stars. You might notice that some shapes, not all, are going to have this little it looks like a control handle. See that one right there? What that’s going to do is if I drag it in, in this case towards the center, I get more of a spiked star depending on how far in I drag it or vice versa. The smiley face had one as well. So you might not have noticed but on his mouth piece here you could drag this up and he would actually frown.
Alright let me show you a couple of other ones. The banners are kind of cool. Banners look like this. And then one more I just want to mention. I told you about the callouts. So I’ve got this smiley face here and I’m just going to move him over a little bit so we can see this. But I’m going to draw one of the callouts.
I’ll just pick this one. And I’m going to draw it right over here. Remember how I just talked about the button you can click on that will actually let you move? See how this will move the little mouth piece here. See that? It changes what the shape looks like. So I can actually make this point to his mouth.
Now by the way you can type inside of any object. So if you select the object and just start typing then your text will be in there.
So I just wanted to bring those to your attention because those are the different types of objects that you can draw. And obviously you want to get in there and play with these so that you’re familiar with what’s here. Like I said we’ll be talking about the Action buttons in a later module because they’re a little bit different here. But go through and play with this and get real familiar with it.
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Now one more I didn’t mention. I want to mention this one that has an A right here. That’s called a text box. So what happens with a text box is I can click wherever I want a text box to be and I can type some text in here. And basically what happens is that it looks like if you make this a little bit wider or if you want it small or whatever, you can see that it just looks like you have random text just sitting out on your slide here. Actually it’s an object and you can put the lines around it and all that stuff.
But see how it just looks like a random text? So that’s kind of what a text box is. You do not have to draw an object like we did here and then put a text box inside of that. So just go ahead and select an object and type and that’ll let you put text in there.
So go ahead and play with those, get really familiar with those because we’re going to be drawing and doing a lot of things with them as we kind of move on here. Okay?
Alright so what I want to next is we’re going to move over into section two and I’m going to show you how to insert some graphic objects.
Simon Calder
Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA.He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!
