Inserting a Graphic

You can drag, paste, or insert a picture into a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document. To insert a graphic, choose Insert → Picture or click the Insert Picture button on the Drawing toolbar (in Entourage choose Message → Insert → Picture) and then select one of the following from the submenu:

  • Clip Art opens the Office Clip Gallery, as described below.

  • From File opens a dialog box where you can choose any graphics file on your Mac.

  • Horizontal Line (Word only) is a quick way to put a horizontal line between paragraphs without opening the “Borders and Shading” dialog box. These lines are actually GIF files. They’re more decorative than standard lines and borders, and ideal for use on Web sites (see Chapter 9).

  • AutoShapes are expanded, elaborate versions of the familiar circles and squares that you create with drawing tools. For instance, AutoShapes include arrows, cubes, banners, and speech balloons.

These two items you choose directly from the Insert menu:

  • WordArt lets you change the look of text in a number of wacky, attention-getting ways. After typing the text, you can stretch, color, and distort it, using Office’s drawing tools (AutoShapes and WordArt).

  • SmartArt Graphiclets you insert pre-designed graphics that show things like process flows, hierarchies, relationships, and so on.

UP TO SPEED: Pictures and Drawings

There are two distinct kinds of graphics in the computer world, which, in Office, are known as pictures and drawings.

Pictures include bitmap files, raster graphics, painting files, JPEG or GIF images, photographs, anything scanned or captured with a digital camera, anything grabbed from a Web page, and Office clip art. What all pictures have in common is that (a) they’re composed of individual, tiny colored dots, and (b) you can’t create them using the tools built into Office. You can make pictures larger or smaller, but if you stretch something larger than its original size, it might look blotchy.

Drawings include AutoShapes, WordArt, and any graphics you create using Office’s own drawing tools. Drawings, also known as vector or object-oriented graphics, are stored by the Mac as mathematical equations that describe their size, shape, and other characteristics. That’s a fancy way of saying that you can resize, rotate, squish, or squeeze drawings as much as you like without ever worrying that they’ll print jagged or blotchy.

Keeping these distinctions in mind will help you understand why your Office programs function like they do when you work with graphics.

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