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About this lesson

Learn to move and color shapes to draw attention to an area.

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2013, 2016, 2019/365.

Exercise files

Download the ‘before’ and ‘after’ Word documents from the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.

Basic Use of Shapes .docx
61.6 KB Basic Use of Shapes - Solution.docx
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Quick reference

Basic Use of Shapes

Learn to move and color shapes to draw attention to an area.

When to use

Shapes are for more than decoration. They draw a reader’s eye to a specific point. For example, the red outline above is simply a rectangle shape placed for a useful purpose.

Instructions:

Note: When you add a shape a new ribbon appears called the DRAWING TOOLS ribbon.

INSERT RIBBON, SHAPES

1.Click Insert, Shapes: a gallery of available shapes appear on the screen

2.Choose a shape and notice your cursor changes to a crossbar.

3.Click to drop, or click and drag to control the size of the shape on your document.
 

MOVE and RE-SIZE a SHAPE

1.Move a Shape:  When dragging a shape to a new area of your document, notice the mouse arrow has a tiny square attached called a “lasso”.  This means something is attached to the mouse and when you let go it will drop it at that point.

2.Re-size a Shape: You can resize using the white handles around the shape frame; and you can use the Size options on the Drawing Tools ribbon.
   

 

SHAPE STYLES

Notice the gallery of Shape Styles with ABC in the shape examples. That allows you to type words inside your shape.

You also can choose a specific “Shape Fill” color, even “No Fill” if you want a transparent box.

You can choose a color for the outline and even the thickness, or WEIGHT, of the outline.

And SHAPE EFFECTS will give a new dimension to the look of the shape. Click and experiment!

 

LAYOUT OPTIONS

1.The tiny symbol next to the shape is the “Layout Options” tool. This allows you to choose how the shape aligns within the text of your document.

2.Click through the options and observe what happens as each is selected.

There is no right or wrong answer when using Layout Options; it is simply up to you and your document design choices.

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  • 00:04 Hello and welcome to The Basic Use of Shapes, which aren't necessarily for
  • 00:08 decoration but more just to draw your attention or
  • 00:11 the reader's attention to a point in your document.
  • 00:14 On the insert ribbon we have the shapes button and here are all the different
  • 00:18 shapes available including equation shapes down here.
  • 00:21 Now these buttons aren't to be clicked and dragged onto the page.
  • 00:24 Instead, you click to activate, click, and
  • 00:27 now my mouse becomes a crossbar, and now I click and drag a shape.
  • 00:31 Now notice I've got an oval right here I didn't necessarily want an oval, so
  • 00:35 I'm going to CTRL-Z to undo a shape that I didn't like.
  • 00:38 So go back to insert, shapes, activate the oval again.
  • 00:42 And now when I click and drag an oval, to get a perfect circle,
  • 00:45 there's actually a little trick.
  • 00:46 It's the Shift key.
  • 00:48 So I haven't let go of my mouse.
  • 00:49 I'm still holding that button down.
  • 00:51 I press and hold Shift, perfect circle.
  • 00:53 When I let go, I can oval.
  • 00:54 Press and hold Shift for a prefect circle.
  • 00:57 Now let go of my mouse and then we have a perfect circle on the screen.
  • 01:00 Now something happened.
  • 01:02 The drawing tools and the format ribbon came up here.
  • 01:05 All the tools you can use with your shape.
  • 01:07 So I can choose a different color.
  • 01:10 I can choose a different outline.
  • 01:12 I can choose a shape effect and put a shadow in the background.
  • 01:16 You can spend all kinds of time on your shape.
  • 01:18 But one thing you can also do is actually type.
  • 01:20 With it selected, I can actually type Hello on the shape itself and
  • 01:25 put a little message in there.
  • 01:28 Alright, let's go ahead and draw a square.
  • 01:29 And I want to show you how you can use a square to bring attention to something.
  • 01:33 So I'm going to click on insert, then I click on shapes, and
  • 01:36 then I choose, let's see.
  • 01:38 I like this one with the rounded rectangle.
  • 01:40 I'll click here and now there's my insertion point,
  • 01:43 I'm actually going to draw a square at the top, this image at the top of my document.
  • 01:50 When I let go, why I just blocked out that image.
  • 01:52 What good did that do?
  • 01:53 Because basically I want to draw a square around it,
  • 01:56 so I'm going to come up here to my shape fill, I'm going to tell it no fill.
  • 02:02 And now my shape outline, I want that to be red.
  • 02:05 And my outline, I want it to be thicker.
  • 02:07 That's called weight.
  • 02:08 So I'm going to go ahead and make it a thicker weight.
  • 02:11 See what I did?
  • 02:12 I just drew a red box around something that I want to draw your attention to.
  • 02:17 So that is how I use squares all the time in my documents.
  • 02:20 Let's go ahead and draw a heart right down here.
  • 02:22 You don't even have to place your insertion point, I just do as a habit.
  • 02:26 Shapes, and then we locate the heart, here it is, and now we draw the heart.
  • 02:33 And of course, we're gonna recolor the heart to be red,
  • 02:36 but you can, sorry, that was the outline.
  • 02:39 Let's do the shape fill as the red.
  • 02:41 That's something else you can do is on the more colors,
  • 02:45 more fill colors, you can actually design your own color in here.
  • 02:49 And you can also set the transparency
  • 02:52 to make the little red heart a little bit transparent.
  • 02:55 Now custom colors, if you have RGB colors, you can retype them in here, or
  • 03:00 you can click and drag around in here and
  • 03:01 change it to whatever shade of red you would like it to be.
  • 03:05 All right. I'll go ahead and click OK.
  • 03:07 Now, when I move this heart over the top of some words,
  • 03:11 I have a transparent heart on my screen.
  • 03:13 So you can do all kinds of things.
  • 03:15 Now one more of the lighting bolts.
  • 03:16 Let's go ahead and click Insert.
  • 03:19 Sorry wrong button, my goodness.
  • 03:21 Insert shapes and this lightning bolt I actually use a lot.
  • 03:24 And when I click and drag a lightning bolt it always faces to the right.
  • 03:29 So right up here on our drawing tools I can actually tell it to rotate and
  • 03:34 flip horizontally.
  • 03:35 Or I could have done it myself.
  • 03:37 I could have clicked one of these slide buttons and folded it like a page in
  • 03:41 a book, and I could've changed which way that lightning bolt faces.
  • 03:45 So, just so you know, these are wonderful tips.
  • 03:48 Again, we don't use them to decorate.
  • 03:50 We use them to draw attention to a certain area.
  • 03:52 But practice with those because you are going to love working with shapes.
  • 03:56 Thank you.

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