If you are great at Excel and lousy at Photoshop, why not use the Excel SmartArt tools to rapidly create prototype graphics for your web designer? All you have to worry about is the message and Excel will make the graphics look good.
The SmartArt book is on sale at http://www.tinyurl.com/smartart14
The SmartArt book is on sale at http://www.tinyurl.com/smartart14
Transcript of the video:
The MrExcel podcast is sponsored by Easy-XL.
Learn Excel from MrExcel podcast, episode 1891.
Using Excel SmartArt for Rapid Graphic Prototyping.
Hey, welcome back to the MrExcel netcast, I'm Bill Jelen.
I've been reading a book lately, by Dave Thomas, called “Dave's Way”.
And it tells the story about a long time ago, before Dave Thomas founded Wendy's restaurants, he was working for a restaurant chain in Indiana.
And they sent him over Columbus Ohio, where some restaurants were failing and when he went in, he said “Holy Cow, there's… there's all of these menu choices, this is just way too confusing for people” and he simplified things.
And when I look at my home page, wow, it's the same thing.
Right here in the first just top half fold, we have all of these different calls to action, like 25 different things, it's just… It's mind-numbing.
And so I said, well, hey, we have to simplify this.
We have to get it down to just our core products.
Right here is the choices at the beginning.
So as I started to think about this, I wanted to create some prototypes, right.
And you know, I'm not great in Photoshop, it would be a disaster for me to go in and just start playing around in Photoshop, but I realized, that Excel has a great tool back here on the INSERT tab and it started in Excel 2007.
It's called SmartArt.
It's just that tiny little icon right there, but check this out.
So with SmartArt I was able to craft my message and these are the three things we want to talk about.
And I just typed those over in the text pane and then those can get hidden, and now I can start to try and figure out the best way to present this message.
Up here on the SMARTART TOOLS, DESIGN tab, we have five different boring formats and then some kind of jazzy formats, here with the glow or the reflection, or something like that.
And then I can choose different colors, right, very easy to change the colors, and if I don't like these colors I can come back to PAGE LAYOUT and choose another color theme.
I've been big on the Slipstream theme lately, I've been using that for the title card for the MrExcel podcast each day.
So you know, change the theme and then you can change colors here.
But it gets even better than that, because I can take this message and show it in completely different way.
So here, under SMARTART TOOLS, DESIGN, under Layouts I can choose any other layout and take that same message, and show it in a very different way, all right.
Now some of these, you know, they emphasize, this is called Level 1 Text this is called Level 2 Text, some of these are better with long bits of Level 2 Text and short bits of Level 1.
This one, it looks like it needs some pictures.
But it's just a great way to very rapidly prototype this, you know.
Hey, this would… maybe we could put some Excel books here or something like that, or products, or, you know, who knows.
I mean, lots of different ways to very quickly go through and prototype without me having to worry about the changes in Photoshop.
You know, to go from one of these to another in Photoshop would take me all afternoon and it would look horrible, but here, you know, I can just type my message and then see, you know, exactly all the different options.
You know, we have Process Charts, List Charts, Relationship Charts, you know, all kinds of different ways that we can present that message using SmartArt.
Now, it's been around since Excel 2007.
When it came out, I thought it was pretty darn cool and so I wrote, what I believe to be the world's only book on SmartArt, called “Leveraging SmartArt Graphics”.
It's such a narrow topic, they never actually printed this book, it's only available as an e-book, so at Amazon you can get it for your Kindle or at InformIT, you can get it for your, you know, any other device, a PDF or something like that.
But it struck me, now I'm an Excel guy and this is a website about Excel, so it would make sense to actually use Excel for the rapid prototyping to, you know, find a way to take this message and present it.
Now let me show you how to create a new SmartArt from scratch.
We're just going to go here, to a blank sheet, INSERT, SmartArt and first they ask you to choose a category: is it a list, is it a process, is it something that repeats… Alright, so I'll just choose List here and then choose one of these, click OK and you get your text box, Text Pane should be showing up.
And you have Level 1 and Level 2, so this is Step 1, Step 2 and Step 3.
But most of the shapes allow for Level 2 Text.
I'm going to press Enter and then Tab to demote this.
So this is 1a, 1b, 1c and you see, the SmartArt just resizes and always looks good, even as I add more shapes to the process.
And then again, colors, choose a nice format and very quickly you have a nice, finished-looking graphic that you can pass on to your web designer and say: hey, make something that looks like this.
Well, hey, I want to thank you for stopping by, we’ll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
Learn Excel from MrExcel podcast, episode 1891.
Using Excel SmartArt for Rapid Graphic Prototyping.
Hey, welcome back to the MrExcel netcast, I'm Bill Jelen.
I've been reading a book lately, by Dave Thomas, called “Dave's Way”.
And it tells the story about a long time ago, before Dave Thomas founded Wendy's restaurants, he was working for a restaurant chain in Indiana.
And they sent him over Columbus Ohio, where some restaurants were failing and when he went in, he said “Holy Cow, there's… there's all of these menu choices, this is just way too confusing for people” and he simplified things.
And when I look at my home page, wow, it's the same thing.
Right here in the first just top half fold, we have all of these different calls to action, like 25 different things, it's just… It's mind-numbing.
And so I said, well, hey, we have to simplify this.
We have to get it down to just our core products.
Right here is the choices at the beginning.
So as I started to think about this, I wanted to create some prototypes, right.
And you know, I'm not great in Photoshop, it would be a disaster for me to go in and just start playing around in Photoshop, but I realized, that Excel has a great tool back here on the INSERT tab and it started in Excel 2007.
It's called SmartArt.
It's just that tiny little icon right there, but check this out.
So with SmartArt I was able to craft my message and these are the three things we want to talk about.
And I just typed those over in the text pane and then those can get hidden, and now I can start to try and figure out the best way to present this message.
Up here on the SMARTART TOOLS, DESIGN tab, we have five different boring formats and then some kind of jazzy formats, here with the glow or the reflection, or something like that.
And then I can choose different colors, right, very easy to change the colors, and if I don't like these colors I can come back to PAGE LAYOUT and choose another color theme.
I've been big on the Slipstream theme lately, I've been using that for the title card for the MrExcel podcast each day.
So you know, change the theme and then you can change colors here.
But it gets even better than that, because I can take this message and show it in completely different way.
So here, under SMARTART TOOLS, DESIGN, under Layouts I can choose any other layout and take that same message, and show it in a very different way, all right.
Now some of these, you know, they emphasize, this is called Level 1 Text this is called Level 2 Text, some of these are better with long bits of Level 2 Text and short bits of Level 1.
This one, it looks like it needs some pictures.
But it's just a great way to very rapidly prototype this, you know.
Hey, this would… maybe we could put some Excel books here or something like that, or products, or, you know, who knows.
I mean, lots of different ways to very quickly go through and prototype without me having to worry about the changes in Photoshop.
You know, to go from one of these to another in Photoshop would take me all afternoon and it would look horrible, but here, you know, I can just type my message and then see, you know, exactly all the different options.
You know, we have Process Charts, List Charts, Relationship Charts, you know, all kinds of different ways that we can present that message using SmartArt.
Now, it's been around since Excel 2007.
When it came out, I thought it was pretty darn cool and so I wrote, what I believe to be the world's only book on SmartArt, called “Leveraging SmartArt Graphics”.
It's such a narrow topic, they never actually printed this book, it's only available as an e-book, so at Amazon you can get it for your Kindle or at InformIT, you can get it for your, you know, any other device, a PDF or something like that.
But it struck me, now I'm an Excel guy and this is a website about Excel, so it would make sense to actually use Excel for the rapid prototyping to, you know, find a way to take this message and present it.
Now let me show you how to create a new SmartArt from scratch.
We're just going to go here, to a blank sheet, INSERT, SmartArt and first they ask you to choose a category: is it a list, is it a process, is it something that repeats… Alright, so I'll just choose List here and then choose one of these, click OK and you get your text box, Text Pane should be showing up.
And you have Level 1 and Level 2, so this is Step 1, Step 2 and Step 3.
But most of the shapes allow for Level 2 Text.
I'm going to press Enter and then Tab to demote this.
So this is 1a, 1b, 1c and you see, the SmartArt just resizes and always looks good, even as I add more shapes to the process.
And then again, colors, choose a nice format and very quickly you have a nice, finished-looking graphic that you can pass on to your web designer and say: hey, make something that looks like this.
Well, hey, I want to thank you for stopping by, we’ll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
