AutoShapes Part 5—Text Inside a Shape

Office applications let you put words inside auto shapes. The shapes you can use includes banners, stars and callouts.

Words inside a banner make a fancy heading. Other shapes can contain quotes from the text to draw attention to them.

The steps are:

1. Draw the shape. To do this, display the Drawing toolbar (View – Toolbars – Drawing). Click the AutoShapes button and select a category. Select a shape from the category and click on it. Click and drag within your document to create the shape.
   
2. Right-click in the shape and choose Add Text.
   
3. You should see a “text box” appear inside the shape, and a flashing cursor. Begin typing your text.

Text does not follow the shape, but rather is entered as left justified. This may not work well for circles and other curved shapes. However, by centring the text, or with manual adjustment (eg shift-enter to force a new line), this can be achieved.

You may be able to avoid some manual adjustment by setting word wrap for the shape.

1. Right-click on the shape and choose Add Text. Enter your text.
   
2. Right-click on the shape and choose Format AutoShape from the shortcut menu.
   
3. Select the Text Box tab.
   
4. Tick Word Wrap in AutoShape, and Resize AutoShape to Fit Text.
   

The text should use the AutoShape boundaries as its margins. It should also resize if the text does not fit. You can resize the shape if this is still required.

Grids

Display grid

Objects line up on an invisible grid. As you move an object, it snaps into position to line up with this grid. Try it with an object you have in your document already. Do you notice the slightly jerky movement as you move it around?

Now hold down the Alt key while you move the object. It moves much more smoothly but does not snap to the grid.

To display the grid:

1. Make sure you have the Drawing toolbar displayed.
   
   
2. Select Draw – Grid from the toolbar. The following dialogue box appears.
   
   
   
   
3. Choose to Display gridlines on screen and click on OK, and your page will now have lines on it, like graph paper.

   

Choose to snap objects to grid, and objects will line up to the gridlines.

Guidelines (PowerPoint)

PowerPoint lets you display guidelines to line up your objects on.

• To display the two default guidelines, click on View – Guidelines.
  
  
• To move these lines, click on them and drag with the mouse.
  
  
• To add more lines, hold down the Ctrl key while you click and drag the lines.
  
  
• To delete a line, double-click on the line.

Note that if you have the lines turned on, two will always be displayed – one horizontal and one vertical.

It is important in PowerPoint to line things up in the same place on each page. Otherwise, as you skip to the next slide, it becomes obvious that the items are not lined up.

Next time, I will be talking about WordArt.