I’ll begin by displaying the toolbar. There’s a long way – View on the menu bar, then Toolbars, then Drawing, and then there’s the way I do it – right clicking on any menu and selecting Drawing. Of course, it has to be a toolbar that you’re right-clicking on for this to work, which is why I have such difficulty teaching this shortcut. Most people can’t handle a right click on a button that is supposed to be left-clicked. Whichever method you choose, you should see the drawing toolbar appear docked on the bottom of your screen.

The very first item I would like to discuss is the "AutoShapes" button. When you click on it, you will see the various shapes available for you to draw. To draw something, you simply select the item and then on the paper, click and drag to draw it. You can also just click and get a default size drawing. I have to admit, I’m still getting used to the stupid drawing canvas in Word 2002. Whenever that dreadful thing pops up, I just ignore it and draw somewhere else, to openly defy it. It sometimes lingers on, even after you delete the object that spawned its existence. When this happens, you merely have to click on its border and hit the delete key.

There are many choices of different things to draw with the AutoShapes menu. To get more interesting things to draw, in the AutoShapes menu you can click on More AutoShapes and select from an array of simple Visio-like shapes, which range from a toilet to what kind of looks like a slightly turned Pac-Man. Lots of fun for those boring afternoons at work.

Now that we’ve looked at the things you can draw, let’s look at how to change them. That’s basically what the last third of the toolbar deals with (you can see the related areas by the faint vertical lines on the toolbar - the last one is between the insert picture button and the fill color button). You can see that my slightly turned Pac-Man is obviously not yellow. To fix this, I click on my Pac-Man to make sure he is selected, and then click on the little drop-down arrow to the right of the Fill Color button to see the different shades. From here, you get a standard range of colors and two other choices - more fill colors, allowing you to create your own color, and fill effects, which will allow you to choose patterns, textured fills, or even another picture to fill it. After I choose the color, I need to get rid of the shadow.

To do this, I click on the shadow setting button, second from the right, and select No Shadow. Now I want my Pac-Man 3-D, because it’s the 2000s, and everything is 3-dimensional now. So I click on the last button, 3-D Style, and choose 3-D effects. From there I can tilt down and adjust some of the other settings, to get the effect I want. OK, so I need to set my Pac-Man right side up, he’s tired of laying on his back. To do this, I need to rotate him. I can find the rotate or flip toolbar on the Draw Menu, under (oddly enough) Rotate or Flip. From there you should see the different rotation buttons. This menu is something I use a great deal so I want to add it to my drawing toolbar. I can do this by undocking the menu to make it float, then dragging it below and to the right of my drawing toolbar.

To do this, I simply point to the very thin bar above all the rotation buttons, then click and drag to get the toolbar. Once it is free floating, it can be released. Then, click and drag the title bar, where it reads Rotate or Flip, and drag it down next to the drawing toolbar. This works if you’ve got a large monitor with a decent resolution, and you can see extra space available next to the drawing toolbar for this small toolbar. Don’t try this if you’re running a 640x480 resolution on a 14" monitor. Now some of you are worried that we’ve removed that toolbar from the Draw menu. But if you look again, you’ll find it’s still there! That’s some of the strange magic that comes with Office 97 and later.

I’ve got the rotation toolbar docked, now I want to fix my poor Pac-Man. I select the drawing, then click on the Free Rotate button, which looks like a green dot surrounded by a blue arrow. Now I can click and drag on one of the green dots that replace the normal white dots, to properly position the Pac-Man upright.

Now I need to give him some regular pellets. I think that’s what they were called. Anyway, to do this, I need to draw perfect circles. This is very easily accomplished by selecting the ellipse shape in the drawing toolbar, then holding the shift key down while I draw. The shift key while drawing will also produce a perfectly straight line and a perfect square, with their respective tools. One of the neat things you can at this point is duplicate. This is like a smart paste, as it remembers the spacing from the last object that you copied. For example, I draw my circle, then hit the keyboard combination Ctrl+D. I get a copy. At this point, I line up my copy the exact space I want from the original, and then hit Ctrl+D again, and this time, it does a copy, but at the specified spacing interval I just set up (interestingly, this option appears under the Edit menu in PowerPoint only, although the keyboard combination Ctrl+D works in all three applications). So I create as many copies of my pellet as I need, keeping the distance consist between copies. At this point, I want to create a power pellet, the kind that makes the ghosts turn blue. To keep it a perfect circle, I simply hold the shift key while I click and drag out on one of the corner white selection circles, resizing the circle larger. To make sure the larger one is lined up correctly, I select the arrow tool (second button from the left on the Drawing toolbar, next to the Draw menu) so that I can drag a surrounding box to select all objects at one time. This tip is particularly important in Excel, where, by default you have the white selection cross, which doesn’t help you at all to select objects. When everything is selected, I go to Draw, Align or Distribute, and then Align Middle. Now my Pac-Man should be positioned to eat the pellets without any stress on his part.

Now I can use the arrow tool to select all the pellets at once, so that I can format them as 3D (2-D pellets don’t taste as good). At this point, I’ve got all my formatting done, and I’m ready to group it together so I can move it around easier. I use the arrow tool to select everything, and then right click, and select Grouping, and Group. To make any changes, you can right click, select Grouping, Ungroup, make the change and then select Grouping, Regroup, and it will be completely regrouped again, without selecting having to reselect all the pieces. To get my regular selector back, I simply click on the arrow tool again.

Okay, so the drawing piece is done, now I need a title for my masterpiece of 80’s nostalgia. I click on the "Insert WordArt" button on the drawing toolbar, which looks like a slightly turned blue A. Once I click on that, I get to choose the style of the WordArt. Then, I have to type in the text. Once that’s done, WordArt exits and goes back into the regular environment. From here, you may need to change the layout of the WordArt. One of the more annoying things in Word is the layout of practically any inserted object - In Line with Text. One of the dead giveaways that you’re in this mode is instead of the happy little white selection circles, you see a black frame with small black squares around your picture. I like to be able to move around my pictures without any lip from Word. To be able to do this, I have to right-click the picture and select Format WordArt (or Picture), and click on the Layout tab, to choose Tight. Once I do that, I can easily move my WordArt anywhere I want on the screen. With WordArt, whenever you select it, you should see the WordArt toolbar popup. From here, you can change anything about it that you want, to make it look exactly the way you want.

So those are the basics of the Drawing Toolbar, and all the fun you can have drawing 80’s arcade game icons instead of working!

Kathleen Hicks is an independent consultant, database administrator and technical trainer. She is the CEO of Absolute Power Computing, Inc. and can be contacted through e-mail.