Quick Try This: 3D, The Fuel for Hotter Slides

We break from our Winter break with a guest post from Chris Becker.  Chris is one of our team's developers who wanted to share some observations on using 3D in PowerPoint 2007. The result is a quick set of steps you can walk through and explore the power of the new text and graphics engines.  -RB

For starters, how do you get a 3D shape? All shapes are 2D until you add a bevel or rotation onto them. Let’s start with a simple shape:

A great way to start with 3D is to use one of the presets. This is the first item under the Shape Effects button:

Choosing any of these items will add a bevel and/or a 3D rotation. I chose Preset 10, and I now have a very nice looking 3D shape:

Using the Bevel and 3D Rotation galleries under Shape Effects, I can customize the look and angle of the shape. You can also change the fill color just like you would on a 2D shape (I’ve darkened it here slightly to show off the bevel better):

Finally, you can add text just like you can with a 2D shape by selecting the shape and typing onto it. The text is rotated in scene with the shape:

Of course, text can have bevels as well, just look under Text Effects. Here I’ve chosen one of the 3D WordArt styles:

And now we have a professional looking, 3D graphic created entirely within PowerPoint! Why is this better than rigging it up in another application and pasting it in as a picture? Obviously it is easily editable within PowerPoint with no application switching, but also when resized this shape will re-render at the correct size (no blocky bitmap artifacts), it responds to themes and can be copy and pasted natively between PowerPoint, Word, Excel and Outlook!

Thanks Chris!