From the course: Word 2016 Essential Training

Diagramming with SmartArt

From the course: Word 2016 Essential Training

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Diagramming with SmartArt

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- There's another type of graphical element that can be added to your Word documents to create visual interest, a easier way to look at data, for example. It's called SmartArt. And it's called SmartArt because it has some intelligence built in. Let's take a look as we continue with our LH Revenues document, LH_Revenues0909, if you need to get caught up. We're scrolling down to the top of the second page, you can click there anywhere. Let's add a title first and we'll just add some text. How about Landon Hotels Sales Cycle. Now we want to demonstrate this. Now we could type out the steps or the process if we wanted to using text, or, even better, create a diagram using SmartArt. So let's go to the left margin next to our title, click there to select, let's bump the size up past 18 to 20, Bold, I think it should be Centered in Paragraph group here, and we'll change the color to that Landon Hotel purple we've been using. Now we can click down below it and we're ready to insert the SmartArt. Key word is insert so we go to the Insert tab, and there's SmartArt in the Illustrations group. Give it a click. Now there are many different categories. By default you'll be looking at all of the possible diagrams, but there are lists and if we click List we'll see each of the diagrams, click one of the diagrams to get a description over here on the right hand side. You can see there's quite a few to choose from here under List. Let's go to Process. You can see a number of different process-type diagrams. And again, selecting any one of them will allow you to read up a little bit on how you might want to use that type of SmartArt diagram. There's Hierarchies, Relationships, Pyramids, Pictures, we want Cycle to display the Sales Cycle. You can see there are different types of diagrams that really do basically the same thing but different formatting, shapes, et cetera. I like this first one, the Basic Cycle. Let's give it a click. And let's click OK. Now it's going to insert, as you can see, a default number of shapes, arrows in between, but you'll see SmartArt Tools up here on the ribbon with a Design tab and a Format tab. Now let's say for our cycle at Landon Hotels we have seven steps. Well there's five here, we need two more shapes. We'll go to the Create Graphic group here on the ribbon and click Add Shape. Now you can click the drop-down to add before or after, but in this case we haven't actually started typing anything. So it doesn't matter. We can just click Add Shape. There's six all together, we need one more, click again, we have seven. Alright, now I'm going to change the size and positioning of this, I'm going to click and drag from the bottom here, just to stretch it out to the full width of the page. And because I do have a number of shapes here, the bigger the better for adding my text. Let's go to the top one. This would be step one in the cycle. We'll type in Prospect, and you can see as we type, what's happening. The text itself is always going to fit. Prospect for Leads. Like so. And what also happens, and this is the intelligence of SmartArt, all of the rest of the shapes are going to be formatted similarly. Okay the arrow goes to this next shape here, so we can click anywhere on the inside. You should see a flashing cursor. The next step, how about Set Appointment. You can see it gets even smaller and so does the rest. Okay, well going to the next circle. Click to select, let's type in Qualify Prospect. Next we'll go to one of the originals that had placeholder text, so clicking you can see the cursor's flashing there, Make Presentation. Alright, we'll go to the next placeholder. After Make Presentation, Close the Sale. Then we go up to the next step, click inside, and Ask for Referrals. Okay so then we realize maybe that's all we need. We don't need seven, six is going to do it. We have this extra shape. Click the shape. It's selected like any other shape with sizing handles, a rotation handle. But let's press our delete keys on the keyboard. Look what happens, it's removed and everything else fills in and resizes accordingly. That's why it's called SmartArt. So we now have our actual SmartArt diagram created. Notice that we have different layouts to choose from, and we could've chosen these from the very beginning, but with our data in there already, we can hover over these to see what it's going to look like if we were to make one of these selections. It's going to look totally different than what we started with. So if you did want to choose something different, go ahead and select it. But I kind of like this first one. I'm going to leave the Basic Cycle selected. But I might want to change colors. Notice the SmartArt styles that we can choose from here all use the same color scheme. Some of them are more three-dimensional than others. I like this Cartoon one, that's kind of neat. But we can change the color scheme if we wanted to. I'm going to go down to some of these more purpley ones that would go with our color scheme for Landon Hotels. And see some of them are lighter than others. This is the one I want here, Color Fill, give it a click. Different colors, different style, deselect by clicking in the background, and there's our SmartArt diagram. And again, it's smart because we can add and remove shapes, everything, size, shape, et cetera will adjust accordingly and automatically, and we can click once to select any of these single shapes, but click on the border around the outside to select the entire thing to move it around, resize it, and so on. Notice it also comes with the Layout Options icon that you can click to treat it like any other graphic, so it's in line with text or placed on the page. I like where it is, so let's click in the background, and there's our SmartArt diagram.

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