Subtitles of the Movie

One of the niftiest new features in PowerPoint 2007 is SmartArt. If you've ever had to create the dreaded organizational chart or custom diagram, you are going to love this new tool. SmartArt is perhaps the best thing to come along since sliced bread and peanut butter, in my humble opinion. Now, in the old days of, oh, about six months ago, I had to create graphics in programs like Illustrator or Photoshop and insert them into PowerPoint slides. Well, that's fine and dandy if I'm the only one who has to make any future changes or revisions to that slide or graphic. But what happens if I'm away from the office, get hit by a bus and somebody needs to have some changes made and it's five minutes before the big presentation. Yikes is right! We have a problem. So with SmartArt, we have the option of creating dozens of new graphics and diagrams that, get this, are editable. Not edible like you can eat them, but edit-able. That means you can edit them. So when the boss comes and says hey, can you fit these changes in, you can look him square in the eye and say yes. Not a problem. Now, since I'm just giving you a brief tour of SmartArt in this scene, we're going to save the detailed lessons for later on. But for now, let's stop talking and get going and seeing what SmartArt does. First of all, I need to create a new slide to put the SmartArt on and it's going to go right there and go to the insert tab, click that once, go to my illustrations group and here is a button for SmartArt. Notice by hovering over this it's going to tell me what's going to happen. We have SmartArt, click once and I get a dialog box that shows me some different options. Let's take a look. First of all, on the left side, we have the different types of SmartArt graphics. We can see all of them and in our middle pane here we can scroll down to see everything that is at our disposal, can then define that down by type of graphic, like so, and then here, as you notice, in the middle pane, we're gong to get some samples that relate to that particular group and go ahead and go with the teeter-totter, click that once and in our far right pane, we see that I was wrong in calling it a teeter-totter; it's called the balance and this gives us a little explanation of how you can use the balance to showcase some of your data. Again, the same thing with the picture accent list, the nested target and pretty much anything that you can see here in your SmartArt graphic list. Let's go back and I'm going to pick the gears, click OK and it's going to automatically insert the gears. Now, what's going to happen is we notice up here, we now have a context-specific tab, or two tabs, added to our ribbon. They're SmartArt tools. We have one for design and one for formatting. I'm not going to get into those very much. I just want to show you, for example, we can change styles here. Notice that as I hover between these, I haven't selected anything yet, it's going to give me a preview of what that looks like. Be patient. It may take second for this to happen. I can also scroll down here to see some of the various styles. Click to select and then that's automatically applied to the graphic. I can change colors like so and then I can also reset the graphic back to its original form. At this point, if you're like me, you're like a little kid in and you want to go play with this, so go ahead, take five or ten minutes, explore SmartArt, insert some more graphics, play with them, come back when you're done and we'll move on to the next scene.