How To Make Great Sketches With Microsoft Excel
Hello my name is John Doyle and I run the ExcelCalcs.com website. I have put together this presentation to help you to produce good sketches in Microsoft Excel.
The freeform line tool which is very powerful and not very well known.
So now you know how to make great looking sketches in MS Excel. I hope to see you on the excelcalcs.com website where we hope to help get the most from excel.
Step 1: Meet John Doyle:
Hello, my name is John Doyle and I run the excelcalcs.com website. I have put together this presentation to show you how to produce good sketches in Microsoft Excel. At the excelcalcs.com website we are particularly interested in using Excel to produce calculations. And sketches are a very succinct way of describing a particular problem and I think that their value is enormous.
Step 2: The toolbar:
The tool bar that we are probably most used to when it comes to drawing objects is the drawing tool bar. I am not going to insult your intelligence now by telling you how to draw lines, arrows and rectangles. They are all very simple, intuitive tools but I would like to spend some time describing the freeform line tool. This is not particularly well documented and I don't believe it is particularly well described on the internet. So I thought I would just spend a bit of time and show you what it is and how you can get the most out of it.
Step 3: Editing points:
I guess you could just scribble out any old shape and if you are like me, you know I have got a shaky hand and you don't particularly get very pleasing shapes from using the tool in that way. The way I tend to use the tool is I click out a number of points but once I have a rough idea of the shape then I use this particular feature which is Edit Points. And it allows us to redefine any particular point already or it also allows us to curve a line that was straight. Or in fact we could completely change the shape by dragging out the point. And you can see what has happened here. We have dropped an extra point in there but we can make any shape. If we drag a straight line then the line stays straight. Now while that is not a particularly useful shape, I think it goes some way to describe how powerful the freeform line tool is.
Step 4: A little frog:
To give you an idea of the kind of complexity you can generate using the freeform line tool I have got a little frog to show you. Some of you might recognize the frog is the excelcalcs.com logo. We like frogs and you can see how we generated all these different freeform shapes. By stretching each one out over the top of the bitmap this makes it very quick and very easy to use even for someone as bad at drawing as I am, I can drag out the freeform shape to the bitmap very quickly. Each shape is then colored in and grouped together. And we can form this nice Windows metafile which is of course totally clean and scalable.
Step 5: Thanks for watching:
So, I just hope that that has made the point for the freeform sketch tool. It is very powerful. It will help you produce very good sketches in Excel. Hope you have found the tutorial useful. Thanks for listening. And I hope to see you on the excelcalcs.com website where we will try to help you to get the most from Microsoft Excel. Thanks for listening.
