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Today's post is by Richard Wolf, General Manager of Microsoft Office Graphics and Meetings, which includes the development teams for PowerPoint and Visio.
I'm occasionally asked "what's your favorite application?" And "what's your favorite feature?" That's akin to asking a parent "which is your favorite child?"
But one of my favorite features is SmartArt graphics, because they can make your slides or documents look so much cooler and they're super easy to use.
Today, we're releasing two new SmartArt graphics for Office 2010, and we'll debut eight more throughout the month. In this post I'll tell you about the first two: Theme Picture Accent and Converging Text SmartArt graphics. In the coming days, program managers, developers, testers, and others here at Microsoft will blog about their favorite SmartArt graphics and share some ideas for using them. So you don't miss any of these posts, be sure to sign up for the RSS feed for this blog- - just click the RSS button in the upper-right corner of this post.
The frame color of the pictures for this layout changes when you change the theme, to help the smaller pictures relate to the large picture in the middle. Use Theme Picture Accent to display team or group pictures such as baby showers or wedding photos, a birthday party, or work teams as I've illustrated here.
The Converging Text SmartArt graphic shows activities, ideas, processes, or pieces merging into one. It's an excellent way to turn a PowerPoint slide with a title and five bullet points into a visual illustration, especially when you use the one-step Convert to SmartArt button on the Insert tab in PowerPoint. Your title appears in the large circle, and your bullets show on the side.
In the example below, I use a before and after pair of slides to show my favorite pizza ingredients.
In Office 2010, you'll see these new SmartArt graphics automatically in the Office.com layout type of the Choose a SmartArt Graphic gallery. (To get to the gallery, on the Insert tab, in the Illustrations group, click SmartArt).
If your connection to Office.com is turned off, you can turn it back on by going to the Privacy Options in the Trust Center, and then selecting the Connect to Office.com for updated content when I'm connected to the Internet check box.
You, our customers, asked for several of these new SmartArt graphics (including picture organization charts). So please use the Comments section below to let us know what you think, tell us how you use SmartArt graphics, and how you decide which one to use in a given situation. And leave us your requests or suggestions, likes, and dislikes as well. I can personally guarantee that each comment will be read by the Office product development team.
For more about other newly released SmartArt graphics, see the following:
--Richard Wolf, General Manager, Microsoft Office Graphics and Meetings
Comments: (7) Collapse
I do not see these new SmartArt graphics in my German PowerPoint 2010. When will they be available to non-US customers?
Nice new stuff here ... thank you. A couple of things though:
1) My LiveID/NetPassport/Whatever isn't good enough here? I have to create a new account just to comment on the blog? That's just silly. Dogfood, people, dogfood. You make it, we eat it, so should you.
2) You might mention that the new shapes aren't available in PowerPoint 2007 (and presumably the rest of Office 2007? Haven't checked there). Or if I'm mistaken and the new content IS available to Office 2007 users, please mention how they can get it.
3) You might also mention that in Office 2010, just changing the trust setting isn't enough. If your trust setting needs to be changed, you must quit and restart the app before the new Office.com section appears in the gallery.
I am also very interested in the new SmartArt graphics but my german Office 2010 is not showing them. Any timeframe when they will be available?
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Good article. It was posted the end of June, it's now the middle of Aug and I don't see any more of the promised related articles. I am really looking forward to them.
When you do post them, please post cross links between the articles to make it easier to find the full set.
I agree with bloggo, I checked and do not have an office.com category in my 2007. Please indicate in each of the articles that these new features are limited to Office 2010. It is too easy to accidentally mislead 2007 users into hoping they have these features too.
@ron007, you bring up a very good point - I went in to this post (and the 4 other posts dealing with the new SmartArt graphics) and provided a bullet point list of links at the bottom. This should help you find all of the information about them quickly and easily. And same with your (and bloggo's) comment about the new SmartArt graphics being available only in Office 2010. That is indeed the case. I went back in to each post, and made it clearer at the beginning of each that the new graphics are available for Office 2010 products.
Thanks to you for taking the time to write in and bring these things to our attention.
-Erik
@Klaus B, it’s taken a while for us to look into why the new SmartArt graphics aren’t yet appearing in German or other non-English languages yet, so thank you again for your patience. After researching the issue, we found that the new SmartArt graphics are “in the pipeline” to be localized into multiple languages, including German, and that they will be available by the end of the year on the localized sites. That sounds like a long time to us, and I’m sure it does to you, too, but you would not believe how many hands these have to pass through. So our apologies that it’s taken a while to answer your question, and that the resolution to it might be less than ideal for you.
When the new SmartArt graphics are released in German, I will leave a comment here to let you and others know, and my colleague Mary Sobczyk will write a blog post on the Office Blog to announce their availability. Because we’ll definitely want to get the word out. Again, thanks for alerting us to this issue and our apologies that we can’t get them to you a bit sooner.
Comments: (loading) Collapse