Although Excel offers 100 built-in AutoShapes, you can use the various handles on the shape itself, or the tools on the drawing toolbar to morph those shapes into thousands of different shapes. Episode 405 shows you how.
This blog is the video podcast companion to the book, Learn Excel from MrExcel. Download a new two minute video every workday to learn one of the 277 tips from the book!
This blog is the video podcast companion to the book, Learn Excel from MrExcel. Download a new two minute video every workday to learn one of the 277 tips from the book!
Transcript of the video:
Hey, welcome back to the MrExcel netcast, I'm Bill Jelen.
We talked about AutoShapes last time, let me show you a few more AutoShape tricks.
When you go into the Other Shapes drop-down, there's seven different categories, and within those categories there's over a hundred different shapes.
If you need to create a lot of shapes from the Basic Shapes, you can just click and drag that palette off so it's floating above your worksheet.
Let me choose the Lightning Bolt icon here and draw a lightning bolt.
Now whenever you draw this lightning bolt, it's always kind of going from upper left to lower right, but it's easy to change that.
If you choose the Draw drop-down there, settings for Rotate or Flip, where you can choose to Flip Horizontal and make it go the other way, or Flip Vertical in order to turn it up the other way.
Or simply grab the green handle, and you're able to rotate that shape in any direction around its central axis.
Now there are other shapes that have a different feature, let’s take one of the Block Arrows.
I'm going to draw an arrow here in the worksheet, you'll see that the arrow starts out as an initial shape, and there's the special handle, the yellow inflection point handle.
Using the inflection point handle, I can choose the basic shape of the arrow.
It basically decides where this shape starts to change.
And so I can create a large arrowhead or a small arrowhead by dragging that inflection point.
So, although there's about a hundred different shapes in the AutoShapes drop-down, by using Rotate or Flip, or the inflection point, you can actually morph those hundred shapes into thousands of different shapes.
Thanks for stopping by, we'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel!
We talked about AutoShapes last time, let me show you a few more AutoShape tricks.
When you go into the Other Shapes drop-down, there's seven different categories, and within those categories there's over a hundred different shapes.
If you need to create a lot of shapes from the Basic Shapes, you can just click and drag that palette off so it's floating above your worksheet.
Let me choose the Lightning Bolt icon here and draw a lightning bolt.
Now whenever you draw this lightning bolt, it's always kind of going from upper left to lower right, but it's easy to change that.
If you choose the Draw drop-down there, settings for Rotate or Flip, where you can choose to Flip Horizontal and make it go the other way, or Flip Vertical in order to turn it up the other way.
Or simply grab the green handle, and you're able to rotate that shape in any direction around its central axis.
Now there are other shapes that have a different feature, let’s take one of the Block Arrows.
I'm going to draw an arrow here in the worksheet, you'll see that the arrow starts out as an initial shape, and there's the special handle, the yellow inflection point handle.
Using the inflection point handle, I can choose the basic shape of the arrow.
It basically decides where this shape starts to change.
And so I can create a large arrowhead or a small arrowhead by dragging that inflection point.
So, although there's about a hundred different shapes in the AutoShapes drop-down, by using Rotate or Flip, or the inflection point, you can actually morph those hundred shapes into thousands of different shapes.
Thanks for stopping by, we'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel!
