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Shapes |
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Each sheet can have its own drawing layer that can contain built-in shapes, custom shapes, and annotations (free-hand drawings).
As shown in the figure, you can use shapes and annotations to draw attention to parts of your spreadsheet or to emphasize some information or process involving the use of the spreadsheet. For example, you can display a logo on your sheet, show a process with flowchart-like graphics, or use shapes to simply highlight a particular result.
You can add free-hand drawing to the drawing layer of the sheet using annotation mode. Annotation mode allows the user to draw in free-hand mode on the shapes layer and to save the annotation on the sheet as a shape.
When selected, the shape has resize handles with which you can adjust the size and a rotate handle with which you can rotate the shape. Colors, shadows, and transparency can be adjusted.
Each sheet can have its own drawing layer. For instance, in a spreadsheet you could create a shape like a "star" or other graphic that could highlight data or point the user to some aspect of working with the sheet. You could then proceed to customize aspects of that star or graphic from size and background color to rotation angle or gradient. The shapes are available in code (each shape being a separate class in the DrawingSpace namespace) or from the Drawing toolbar in the Spread Designer.
Drawing Toolbar
The Drawing toolbar provides a quick way to draw shapes on the spreadsheet using the Drawing layer.
The Drawing toolbar consists of a Draw menu, a link to the Shape Properties dialog, and several drawing-related icons for selecting the shape, the color, and line thickness.