SmartArt in MS Office

Okay, I admit that I do not carefully study the list of new features every time a piece of software is updated. Bad Chris — for shame! I usually stumble on the bits I missed sooner or later. A good example is the way a recent post in Alex Ambrose’s EdVibes alerted me to SmartArt. It’s been there for at least two years, but I never used it until today…

SmartArt is a very cool way to convert uninteresting displays of text or numbers in PowerPoint, Excel, or Word into more deliberate visualizations. I created the image at left using SmartArt in MS Word on a Mac. It illustrates a key set of concepts I teach in my multimedia course.

I did a quick search on YouTube and found this Demo of SmartArt graphics. It was done by Microsoft and may be a bit TOO polished, but I thought it gave a very good overview for Windows users. I also found a good article on SmartArt at Microsoft’s website. I’d love to hear from people who have used this effectively in a class. I also found a video podcast for Mac users – it’s from the Lynda.com series.