Make your point visually with SmartArt

- [Instructor] When creating a Word document, there may be times when you need to explain a process, a cycle, maybe show a hierarchy, and simply typing in text will do the job, but it's not all that visually appealing. It may be easier to understand and look at if it's in graphical format. So of course here in Word we have the tools to create graphical elements, but there's one feature we're going to talk about in this week's Word Tip that will do a lot of the work for you. It's called SmartArt. You can see I've opened up a file here called Landon Sales Cycle 023, and apparently just below this paragraph, there's going to be a diagram illustrating the steps in the sales cycle here at Landon Hotels. Well if I wanted to, I could go up to the Insert tab and you can follow along with me. We could start adding shapes that would display the cycle, and then start adding text to those shapes, and then adjusting them so the text fits nicely. Add, remove shapes, maybe add arrows to show the order. It's a lot of work and very time consuming. Instead, we should probably use SmartArt, and it's called SmartArt because there is a level of intelligence built into it. Let's go ahead and click SmartArt. Now from here, by default you're going to see all of the SmartArt graphics you can choose from, and as you scroll down you can see it's quite a lengthy list, and they are broken up into different categories. We see those categories down the left. If you need to list items, you can click List, and see a number of different thumbnails. Hover over those to get the title. Select one of these thumbnails to see a preview over here on the right-hand side with a description of what you might want to use that graphic for. Lots of different options. Some of them allow you to add pictures for example. If you want a list of all the different categories that use pictures, you can go down to Picture, and in this case all you're going to see are SmartArt graphics that will allow you to add pictures. I'm thinking perhaps a Hierarchy would be a good one if you had head shots for example of each of the people you're going to be representing in a hierarchy, you might want to add them. Here's an example of one that would use those pictures and text. But we want to describe the sales cycle, and you'll notice there is a category for Cycles. Process could work as well if we wanted to show something in order, but I think Cycle is going to work for our sales cycle, so we'll go there. Select the first one if it's not already selected, and you'll see a preview over here. This is the basic cycle. It's going to use circles and arrows, and the coloring that you see is going to be based on the theme you're using. That's the other intelligence that's built into SmartArt. Let's go over to the third one over here, and by the way after we create this, we can come back here and change the layout if we want to, and the formatting. Block cycle, this one has a circle in behind, no arrows. I think we'll go with this one with the arrows. You can see the direction they're pointing. So with Block Cycle selected, we'll click OK, which gives us the default. So we'll scroll down a little bit. It's inserted just like any other graphic. You can see the handles around the outside. By default we have five blocks. Now, it may be that your sales cycle has six steps, and you need to add. Well you'll notice up here on the ribbon, SmartArt Tools appears, with two tabs, Design and Format. With Design selected, way over here on the left-hand side we can add shapes, add bullets inside those shapes, open up something called the Text Pane that allows us to add the text inside the graphic in a bulleted list. Let's click Text Pane and you can see what that looks like. Cursor flashing at the top waiting for us to type something in. Well, we can close that up the same way we turn it on, because we can actually work inside the graphic itself, but we do need an extra one, so let's add a shape. Now clicking Add Shape will add one after the current shape, and you can see the top one is selected, has its own handles around the outside. Click the drop-down arrow if you need to add it before or after. You get to choose this way. I'm going to add the shape before. You can see what happens. It gets added, it's now the current shape, and look what happened here. Because we have an extra one, all of the boxes have become a little bit smaller so they still fit inside this area, which by the way, we can use the handles to resize if we needed to. Let's do that, little bit bigger. So we don't have to worry about resizing all of the boxes after the fact. Everything's done for us. Let's click inside that new box, and then double-click to get inside. You won't see a flashing cursor like you do with the placeholders, but you can start typing. So let's say the first step is to generate leads. Let's start typing. You can see the size of the text. As you continue to type, the text gets smaller, and eventually, adds to another line. So, by default, it's not only changing here but in the other boxes for consistency as well. Something you don't have to worry about. That's the smart part of SmartArt. Let's go into the next box and continue typing in. How about, Make Appointment. You can see that's even smaller. Then next one we click, just once, and type in, how about Qualify Prospect. We'll continue filling these in. Next is Present, or Presentation. I'm going to type in Present. Next we'll close the sale, hopefully, which takes us to this last box, which is to get referrals. There we go. So we have our six boxes. We have our content added. Everything is adjusted so it looks nice and neat, and consistent. Now we can just click the border around the outside and think about how we're going to format this. I mentioned earlier that we could change the layout if we wanted to. Let's go back up to the Layouts now that appear under the Design tab here, and if you wanted to, just hover over some of these to get a look at what it would appear like if you were to make that selection. For example the first one, that's not bad. There's the one with the circle in behind it, non-directional cycle. Here's a new one, I kind of like this one here, Continuous Cycle, because then we want to start over at the beginning. So let's select that, and by the way you can click the drop-down to see some of those other options as well. But we're going to go with this one here, Continuous Cycle. Changes it up, all of the formatting, the arranging done for us. Next we can go to the different styles that appear here. Lots of cool styles to choose from, including some three-dimensional options. Now as we hover over these we get a preview. A realtime preview down below of what that's going to look like. If you want to try out some of the 3D options, just hover over them. You can see what they look like, very cool, and keep in mind that we're using the theme that's built into this document. So if you're seeing a different set of colors, you might be using a different theme. I'm going to go with this one up here called Inset, and click. Now we can change the colors ourselves. Click the Change Colors drop-down to see different color schemes to choose from, and again as you hover over these, you get a nice realtime preview in the background of what that's going to look like. But instead, just click in the background, anywhere in the background to close up that menu. Click again in the background to deselect your graphic, and instead, let's go up to the Design tab here and we'll go to some different themes by clicking the Themes drop-down. You can hover over these and see that it's actually going to change your document. So if it's using headings for example, you'll see the headings change up top, as well as the graphic itself. And if you've created your own custom ones like I have, called Landon, you get the Landon Hotel colors and fonts. I'm going to go ahead and select that. You can choose any theme you like, and at anytime we can still come back here to the graphic itself. Just click the border so it's selected, and you'll have access to the Design tools and Format tools for working with that graphic. But I'm going to click in the background because that looks exactly the way I want it to look. Easier to understand, visually appealing, and with built-in intelligence, getting the work done is fast and easy.