Thursday, July 23, 2015

Working with SmartArt Graphics in Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office’s SmartArt Graphics is a powerful feature that is often underused.When writing a document or creating a presentation, it is always recommended to present information and concepts in a visual way. This allows the reader to better comprehend everything you are trying to say.  Your readers or audience will be more easily engaged if you use graphics and visualization.   The point of the report or presentation that you are sending to your boss or teacher will be clearer and more concise. On the other hand, if you want to present your information better to your students to ensure that they understand concepts correctly, using visualizations is a must.

Microsoft Office has all you need for creating visualizations, diagrams and plans. There is no need to use external software when everything you need is in the software itself. All you need to do is choose an appropriate SmartArt graphic.
There is a wide variety of choices. There are choices for graphics that can be used to present information in the form of a list, a process, hierarchy, a circle, pyramid, and relationships in an efficient and appealing way.
All you need to do is to go to Insert – SmartArt  and choose the appropriate graphic. You will probably need to experiment with a couple of different ones, but without a doubt, you will find one that fits your needs exactly.
insert smartart graphic
1) Inserting Text
Inserting text is easy. All you need to do is click on the Shape and enter the text.
text pange in smartart graphics
You can also enter bullet points by clicking on SmartArt Tools – Design –  Insert bullets.
add bullet to text
To change the text color, font size, or other details, simply right click on the Shape.
change text color and size
2) Implementing 3-D graphs
You can turn every graph that you insert into a 3D graph by going to SmartArt Tools – Design – Styles, and choosing one of the 3D options.
3d graphics
3) Change SmartArt Graphics’ color
change color in smart art tool
If you don’t like the default blue color of the graph, you can easily change it by simply going to SmartArt Tools, and choosing the option Change Color.
4) Change color and layout of specific shape
change shape look
Right click on each shape to see all of the available options for change. You can change the shape look, layout, color, transparency, edges and more. This is especially useful in cases where you want to have shapes of different color in order to differentiate between subjects.
format shape
5) Add new shapes
Sometimes you want to add more levels of shapes in SmartArt Graphics. For examples instead of 4 elements in a circle, you would want to have 5 elements.
add shapre to smart art graphics
This can easily be done by going to SmartArt Tools – Design – Add Shape, or by right-clicking the Shape – Add Shape – Add Shape After/Before.

Best Websites with Microsoft Word Templates

Microsoft Word is one of the most widely used textual editors for creating different types of documents, such as press releases, letters, books, resumes, reports and more. Many people use Word on a daily basis for work.
Once they start working on a document, beside content, they also have to worry about its design and visual appearance, especially if the document needs to be forwarded to somebody. A nicely structured report, memo or CV will always make a better impression on a boss or colleague than a poorly structured one.
If you are not particularly skilled at designing the reports yourself, you can always use premade Word templates, which can save you time and help you create a professionally looking document in a second. The additional benefit of using templates is that you don’t have to start from scratch, because they provide basic elements you can work with.
Here are some websites that contain excellent templates for various purposes, from budget, educational and project to CV templates. There is a little bit of something for everybody, regardless of what type of documents you usually work with.
search for online templates
The Microsoft Office website is probably the first place you should visit. In many cases you will immediately find what you need, because the choice is pretty wide. MS Word templates are divided into more than 30 categories ranging from Agendas, Invoices, Minutes and Photo Albums, through Timelines, Calendars, Maps and Menus, to Posters and Flyers. You can search for new templates right inside the Microsoft Word 2013 interface, as you can see from the image.
free microsoft office templates
Hloom is another site with a lot of free templates for Word. They are divided into categories and subcategories. All of these templates look pretty modern. We especially recommend the Resume and Flyers section.
word templates vertex
The Vertex website has a couple of completely free and pretty useful templates. All of them are mostly oriented towards business use and career improvement.
This website doesn’t have a big choice of free Word templates, but some templates are pretty interesting and it’s worth checking them out.

Creating citations and bibliographies in academic work is very common. Every time we use another author’s work, we must refer this author and cite them. There is a way to do this with the features of Word that will make the process much simpler.

Let’s get to it!
1.First, Click the References tab.
2.Click Insert Citation.
3.Click Add New Source.
insert citation in word
Enter the information according to its bibliographic information.
create source in word
The reference to the author will be inserted into the document.
example of reference in word
The cool thing about using this feature is that the quote is saved and can be used as often as necessary.
As you create your quotes, you can also enter a bibliography.
insert bibliography in word
All you have to do is to select one of the options.

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