Using SmartArt to Share Your Ideas

Finding impactful ways to present our ideas is an important part of the storytelling process. This is especially important when we introduce new ideas, analyze challenges, and discuss the projects and processes that we are working on with our audience. Sometimes spreadsheets, PowerPoint slides, and pages of written text are not the right visual solution for our audience, the story we are telling, or the ideas we want to share.

However, there are additional features in Microsoft Office that can help us to present our ideas through customizable graphics. One such feature that is available in Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, is SmartArt.

SmartArt allows you to use a variety of templates to present and visualize your data and ideas in more dynamic ways. Some of the templates that are available can help you visualize processes, hierarchies, relationships, matrixes, cycles, and lists. Each template, once inserted into your Microsoft file, can be customized. For instance, the color, size, font, and levels of a template can be changed. You can even switch layouts after you have entered your data, and SmartArt can be copied and pasted from one Microsoft file to another, such as from Microsoft Word to PowerPoint.

To learn more about what SmartArt can do, and how to use it, click here.