More Option In Smartart Graphics For Powerpoint On Mac

To access additional SmartArt graphic layouts, click the More Layouts option, shown highlighted in red within Figure 5. Figure 5: More Layouts option; This opens the Choose a SmartArt Graphic dialog box, as shown in Figure 6. Select any of the SmartArt graphic variants you want to change to, and click the OK button.

SmartArt is not PowerPoint + Bob Ross. PowerPoint is often criticized for encouraging presenters to rely too heavily on bullet points and not helping people to communicate more visually.

Microsoft added a feature known as SmartArt to help convert text into various stylized graphics. When you’re designing your PowerPoint presentation, you can quickly rotate through various shapes, colors, layouts, and styles in order to find the right graphic for your presentation. For novice or casual PowerPoint users, SmartArt can be a handy tool for quickly making your presentation more visual and professional looking. If you decide to use SmartArt in your PowerPoint slides, you need to be careful because SmartArt is dumb. Warning: SmartArt is dumb.

I'm not calling SmartArt stupid.just dumb. (c) Shutterstock Hear me out before you say, “Hey, PowerPoint Ninja, you’re dumb! SmartArt is the greatest.” By “dumb” I don’t mean “stupid”.

When I refer to SmartArt as dumb, I mean what the refers to as “not having the capacity to process data.” In other words, SmartArt is not going to intelligently guide you to a diagram style that is appropriate for your content. SmartArt provides you with lots of visual options, but it is up to the presenter to choose an appropriate graphic based on his or her content. This is where presenters and SmartArt can go wrong. Recently, I was asked to fix some slides that someone else had built. The main slide of the presentation emphasized the three core teams (consulting, training, and client support) within our client services department.

The designer had used a diagram with three flowing circular arrows that has been re-purposed several times in various presentations at my company. The diagram wasn’t a SmartArt graphic, but like SmartArt it was used as a more visually attractive alternative to a boring list of bullet points. The circular flow diagram wasn't an appropriate diagram in this case. The diagram needed to align better with the content -- aesthetics aside. R eplacing bullet points with the wrong graphic is worse than just having bullet points. It’s a downgrade, not an upgrade.

The circular motion of the graphic implied that our customers flowed through consulting to training to client support — and then the whole process would be repeated over and over. If our clients never had to work with our client support team, I wouldn’t see that as a problem. And yet the diagram’s circular flow implied our customers would rotate through the different teams when this wasn’t intended or wanted. The diagram didn’t accurately portray what needed to be communicated — that these three teams are the core foundation of our client services organization. As a result, I changed the circular-arrow diagram to different diagram with three pillars — each pillar representing one of the three teams.

Choose your diagrams wisely With diagrams you need to remember that the diagram style contributes to the overall message just as much as the actual labels do. You need to choose an appropriate graphic for what you’re trying to communicate. Each type of diagram — chart, map, timeline, venn, etc. — has different strengths, weaknesses, and preconceptions. PowerPoint users may not realize that Microsoft provides helpful descriptions of each SmartArt graphic and how they should be used in the SmartArt pop-up window. If SmartArt was so smart, why couldn't I ungroup it?

(c) Shutterstock You may be wondering if PowerPoint ninjas are too cool to use SmartArt. Actually, I’ve frequently wanted to use this feature, but a fatal flaw of SmartArt has been the inability to ungroup and customize SmartArt objects directly.