Tips of the Week - Information Technology

Technology Tip of the Week - April 24, 2006

Using Drawing Tools

Did you know that there is whole group of drawing tools available to you among the Office applications that allow you to draw and manipulate arrows, squares, circles, rectangles, lines and a host of other shapes. Once you draw a shape on a page or slide you can fill it with a color, change the color of the line around the shape, rotate it, layer it, etc. What fun!

This week, let's look at how to draw a simple circle. We'll draw this circle in PowerPoint, but the same drawing tools are available in Word and Excel too. Once you know how to do this in one program, it works the same in all the other programs

Open PowerPoint

Open a new slide and change the format to "blank" (from the menu bar choose Format - Slide Layout - select the Blank slide)

Now you want to reveal the Drawing Toolbar. From the menu bar choose View - Toolbars - Drawing. You should now see an additional toolbar showing up (note that this toolbar is often showing at the bottom of the screen, depending on how many other toolbars you have open.)

Move your cursor over the toolbar until it is on the "oval" button . Click once on the oval button to select it (you should see it change color).

Now move your cursor onto your blank slide (don't hold down your mouse button yet). Your cursor shape should now look like a plus symbol or crosshair shape . Move your cursor to where you want the shape to start. Hold down your Shift key to constrain the oval shape to a circle. With the Shift key depressed, press down the left mouse button and drag to the size you want the circle to be. When the circle looks right to you, let go of the Shift key and the mouse button. You should now see a perfect circle on your slide.

To change the fill color of the circle, click once on the circle to select it. Then click on the arrow next to the little paint bucket button on the Drawing toolbar to see the available colors. Click on the desired color and you should see the new color fill the circle on the slide.

If you want the border of the circle to be a different color than the fill, make sure that the circle is still selected. Click on the arrow next to the Line color button that looks like a fine paintbrush . Select the color you want.

You can go back to either of these steps to change the colors until you are happy with the effect. That's it!

Try the same process with other shapes, like the arrow or the rectangle. If you want a perfect square, hold your Shift key down after you select the rectangle shape in order to constrain it (just like changing the oval to a circle).

Next week we'll talk about layering shapes.

For more help with this feature, please contact one of the faculty mentors - Tony Basilico (abasilico@ccri.edu) or Luis Malaret (lmalaret@ccri.edu) or one of the IT Instructional Support team (Norm Grant, Gene Grande or Linda Beith).

Website of the Week

Slam Dunk Digital Lessons

Explore Dr. Jamie McKenzie's website created to help teachers create quick, easy but thought-provoking activities for their students at: http://questioning.org/module2/quick.html. Dr. McKenzie originally designed these templates and guides for K-12 teachers, but the same structure could be easily applied to any level - you'd just adjust the depth of the questions and activity. Enjoy!

Feel free to post your thoughts or opinions of this site in the Teaching Forum message board.

These tips are provided by the Department of Information Technology instructional support team. If you have any questions on these tips, or wish to offer your own, please feel free to contact Linda Beith at lbeith@ccri.edu. View an archive of past technology tips at http://it.ccri.edu/Training/Tips/tip_week.shtml.