Inserting Clip Art
As with other object types, you can insert clip art either through a placeholder or manually with the Insert menu. There are some fairly significant differences between them, summarized in Table 9-1.
Table 9-1: DIFFERENCES BETWEEN CLIP-ART PLACEHOLDERS AND MANUALLY INSERTED CLIP ART
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Placeholder
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Manually Inserted
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Insertion
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A Select Picture dialog box appears.
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The Clip Art task pane appears.
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Layout Change
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If new layout contains a clip-art placeholder, the clip moves to the specified new location. Otherwise, the clip moves to the far right edge of the slide and becomes "orphaned."
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The layout change does not affect the clip art.
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Deletion
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The original placeholder reappears.
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The clip's deletion does not affect the rest of the slide.
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The most obvious difference between the two methods is that inserting with the placeholder opens the Select Picture dialog box, a considerably less powerful and user-friendly interface than the task pane that opens when you insert manually. Because of this, I tend to go with manually inserted clip art, whenever feasible.
| Note |
The first time you try to insert clip art, a dialog box appears prompting you to catalog the clips on your hard disk and associate keywords with the clips. This is useful because it enables you to access all the graphics on your hard disk from the Clip Organizer without your having to specifically add each clip to it. It does take a few minutes, however. Click the Now button to do it now or click Later to postpone the task.
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Inserting Clip Art with a Placeholder
The main advantage to using a placeholder for clip art is that if you change the slide layout later, the clip art will move automatically to wherever the new layout specifies that the clip should be positioned. For example, if you switch from a layout where the clip is to the right of the bulleted list to one where it is to the left, it moves.
You can either use a layout that specifically calls for clip art, as shown in Figure 9-4, or use one of the multi-purpose graphic placeholders, as shown in Figure 9-5. The only difference is that with the specific clip-art placeholder, you must double-click, whereas with the multi-purpose placeholder you single-click the Clip Art icon.
Either way, when you click (or double-click) the icon, the Select Picture dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 9-3. From here you can do the following:
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Type a keyword in the Search text box and click Go to find all clips that have that keyword. Then, click the desired clip and click OK to insert it.
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Click the Import button to open the Add Clips to Organizer dialog box, from which you can select graphic files on your hard disk to add to the Clip Organizer. (I'll cover this procedure in greater detail later in the chapter.)
That's pretty much it! The Insert Picture dialog box is not particularly powerful or flexible. The manual method described in the next section has many more options.
Manually Inserting Clip Art
For complete access to the Clip Organizer's features, you will want to manually insert clip art via the Clip Art task pane or the Clip Organizer window.
| Tip |
You can use the manual method for clip art insertion even if you have a placeholder on a slide that you want to use. Simply select the placeholder frame before manually inserting, and PowerPoint will use that placeholder for the insertion.
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To open the Clip Art task pane, do any of the following:
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Choose Insert⇨Picture⇨Clip Art.
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Click the Insert Clip Art button on the Drawing toolbar.
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Display any other task pane (View⇨Task Pane) and then open the drop-down list at the top of the task pane and choose Clip Art.
Then type one or more keywords in the Search for box (see Figure 9-6), refine the search in any additional ways desired (as explained in the following sections) and click Go. When you find the clip you want, click it to place it on the active slide. (You can change slides between doing the search and selecting the clip, if you find yourself on the wrong slide.)
