Connect shapes easier in Excel

- [Narrator] If you use objects in your workbook that need to be connected to other objects, such as you'd see with shapes in a flow chart, Excel has new connectors that make it very easy to get those objects connected. All you need to do is go up to the "Insert" tab, from "Illustrations" click there, and go to "Shapes" Here you'll see, in the "Lines" category, a number of different connectors. So if we wanted to connect shapes we might choose one with an arrow, for example. A straight-line arrow.

And when you move your mouse over one of the shapes you'll see little connector spots appear. That means you can go to any one of these, just simply click-and-drag to the next shape, and you'll see those appear there. And by default, they'll automatically be connected when you get to the vicinity of that connection point. When you release, you have your connector. And you'll see drawing tools, with the "Format" tab up here so you can do things like change up the shape-styles.

In this case, we're working with a line, so you'll see different line-styles you might want to work with. I'm going to go with a nice dark green. Let's try a different type connector, now. We can go right here, with the "Format" tab still selected to "Insert Shapes" and choose a different one like an elbow connector, for example. Selecting this with the arrow, again we just hover over a shape, when we get to a connection point, click-and-drag and you can see it's automatically going to be drawn for us and connected to the shape, wherever we hover over a point.

And it's automatically going to be drawn so as not to interfere with the shape, any contents they're in and when you release, you can see the end result. There are things you can adjust, for example this handle in the center allows us to increase or decrease the height. And of course, we can go back to our "Shape Styles" and choose a matching style. Let's try it one more time here with our decision shape, here, by going back to the same elbow connector, hover over a connection point, and release on the next shape's connection point.

Automatically drawn, we'll format it the same as the others. Now, you'll also notice that with these connection points you can make adjustments. Not only to the height by clicking-and-dragging the handle but you can also go to the connection point itself. When you see the double arrow you can click-and-drag it to a different connection point, and it will automatically connect, and draw the way it should be drawn so as not to interfere with anything else in the shape.

So thanks to this new connector functionality here in Excel you'll be connecting objects to one another faster and easier than ever.