Excel 2010 Bible

Chapter 22: Enhancing Your Work with Pictures and Drawings

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FIGURE 22.6

A Shape, before and after editing its points.

Using SmartArt

Excel’s Shapes are certainly impressive, but the SmartArt feature is downright amazing. Using

SmartArt, you can insert a wide variety of highly customizable diagrams into a worksheet, and you

can change the overall look of the diagram with a few mouse clicks. This feature was introduced in

Office 2007, and is probably more useful for PowerPoint users. But many Excel users will be able

to make good use of SmartArt.

Inserting SmartArt

To insert SmartArt into a worksheet, choose Insert ➪ SmartArt. Excel displays the dialog box

shown in Figure 22.7. The diagrams are arranged in categories along the left. When you find one

If you create a graphic in Excel using Shapes, SmartArt, or WordArt, you may want to save the graphic

as a separate file for use in another program. Unfortunately, Excel doesn’t provide a direct way to

export a graphic, but here’s a trick you can use. Make sure that your graphic appears the way you want

it and then follow these steps:

1. Save your workbook.


2. Choose File ➪ Save As to save your workbook as a Web Page. In the Save As dialog box,
   select Web Page (.htm; .html) from the Save as Type drop-down list.


3. Close the workbook.


4. Use Windows Explorer to locate the HTML file you saved in Step 2. You’ll notice that Excel
   also created a companion directory for the HTML file. If you save the file as myart.htm, the
   directory will be named myart_files.


5. Open the directory, and you’ll find .png graphic files — one for each graphic object in
   your workbook. The .png files have a transparent background.

Exporting Graphic Objects