Drawing Tools in Word & Excel?
April 27, 2006 by Jason Bean
Filed under Computers
You knew they were there right? Please tell me you knew that you could “draw” in Word at least. What’s the deal?
One of the most startling and consistent pieces of feedback we’ve received from the early deployments of Office 2007 Beta 1 (and Beta 1 Technical Refresh) has been: “It’s great that you added the drawing tools to all of the Office programs! Now I don’t need to create the drawings in PowerPoint and copy them into Word/Excel/Outlook…”
Surprised? I certainly was.
That quote is from Jensen Harris’ blog entry, Breathing New Life into Old Features.
How long has Office 2000 and 2003 been out now? Surely the Drawing Toolbar wasn’t that hidden from the users was it? However, that type of oversight is exactly the type of thing that makes me wonder about the real world impact of the new document formats in my previous post.
I just loaded Office 2007 one week ago (today is 2/26/08). For the most part I can see that I will adjust to the new ribbon style but the drawing tools are less convenient than in 2003. Every time I select something from the drawing bar it hides. This is fine if I’m drawing one object but a real pain for continuous drawing of objects. Is there a way to lock the drawing tools on the screen?