Using Visio 2007 Shapes and Diagrams in Presentations
You’re giving a presentation to the team and need to unveil the schedule for a new project. Could you do it using only bullet points? Certainly. But if you’ve read those books about creating winning presentations, you know that a picture carries more weight with your audience than a slide full of text, or a little over 1,000 words, whichever comes first, as the slides in Figure 13-1 show.
Figure 13-1. Two looks at the same slide: Before Visio 2007, the slide used only text to convey its message. After bullets are replaced with an Visio 2007 timeline, the slide’s purpose is much clearer.
In the past, many Microsoft Office customers used PowerPoint as their primary diagramming tool because it was already on their desktop and included reasonably simple drawing tools. However, you can create and revise so many more kinds of diagrams in Visio 2007 than PowerPoint that it’s well worth your while to use Visio 2007 as the diagramming extension to your PowerPoint 2007 presentation. Additionally, the diagrams you create in Visio 2007 can be saved separately from the presentation and used for other purposes.
Methods for Adding Shapes and Diagrams to Slides
The process for getting your Visio 2007 diagram into PowerPoint 2007 doesn’t have to be any more complex than copying and pasting. However, there are a couple of different ways you can copy in Visio 2007 depending on what you want to do, and there are a couple of different ways to paste in PowerPoint 2007, depending on how you want to use the item you copied.
Here’s a summary of the techniques you can use to display Visio 2007 shapes and diagrams in PowerPoint 2007 slides:
Copy shapes If you have a shape or several shapes in Visio 2007 that you want to use on a slide, select the shapes, press Ctrl+C to copy them, and then in PowerPoint 2007 press Ctrl+V to paste them.
Edit in place If you just need a quick Visio 2007 diagram to use one time only on a slide, you can open Visio 2007 from within PowerPoint 2007 to do what’s called in-place editing.
Link or embed If you want to create an Visio 2007 diagram as a separate file so that you can revise it more easily or use it in other documents besides the presentation, create your diagram and then link or embed a copy of it on a slide.
For details about linking, embedding, and in-place editing, see Chapter 7, “Using Visio Diagrams with Other Programs.”