Tendrils and Doodles

I doodled some non-euclidean monstrosities! Then I quickly live-traced them into vectors! Yay vectors!

Pathfinder in PowerPoint

Okay. I've got sort of a love/hate relationship with Microsoft right now. I've not exactly kept it a secret that I use PowerPoint for vector drawings probably a lot more than I should.

But one of the major drawbacks to using PowerPoint over actual drawing programs like Illustrator is that PowerPoint isn't a drawing program, it's presentation software. There are some things you'd expect from a proper drawing program that PowerPoint just can't do, like pathfinder selections.

Except that PowerPoint 2010 totally has pathfinder selections. Microsoft just hid them.

I can't explain why. Honestly the whole thing is a little baffling to me. Both Illustrator and PowerPoint are vector drawing programs, and both deal with object outlines. It would make sense that they would both have pathfinder abilities, and it seemed odd to me that PowerPoint didn't. After a bit of digging, it turns out it does, but you wouldn't know unless you looked very, very closely.

For those unfamiliar, pathfinders are tools used to modify object outlines in a way that corresponds with other object outlines. With pathfinders, it's possible to combine multiple shapes into one based on their outline, like so:

In Adobe Illustrator, enabling pathfinders is as simple as going to Windows > Pathfinder. Here's the window. Very simple, very prominent.

Now let's devote a few paragraphs and a long string of visual aides to show you how to get to pathfinders in PowerPoint.

First, open PowerPoint. Right-click on an empty portion of the toolbar. Select Customize the Ribbon. That's right. Not only is this feature hidden, but the feature to unlock the feature is hidden.

Clicking Customize the Ribbon will open the PowerPoint Options dialogue box. Here you can change the contents of your existing toolbars, or, in this case, create a new one.

This next bit is my personal preference. You can create your toolbar anywhere you'd like, but I prefer to put it under the drawing tools menu, so it shows up when shapes are selected. In order to do that, you'll need to open the right drop-down menu and select All Tabs.

Navigate down to the Drawing Tools and select Format. Clicking the New Group button (highlighted in blue at the bottom) will add a new group, which can hold commands like those seen in the left list. So now we can put the pathfinder commands in that group, right? Surely there isn't another level of needless obscurity on top of all this to prevent you from unlocking this basic drawing feature, right? Surely not.

To get through the next level of needless obscurity, change the Popular Commands dropdown to Commands Not in the Ribbon. There is a section specifically devoted to the things being kept hidden. There are a lot of baffling things to look past with this whole process, but take an extra moment to let this particular bit of nonsense sink in.

This menu is mostly filled with options that exist elsewhere in the program, but not necessarily on toolbars. Menus that show up when particular objects are right-clicked, dropdown options, subpanels, and the like. There is a set of commands, however, that doesn't appear anywhere else in the program. These are the Shape Combine, Shape Intersect, Shape Subtract, and Shape Union commands. These four options compose the basic abilities of any pathfinder set. Highlight them one by one and - with the new group selected - click the Add button between the two menus.

And there we have it. Now you've got your own pathfinder panel. Let's name it and get out of here. Click Rename down below the right-hand menu next to the New Group button.

This is the rename menu. Because everything else made so much sense. You'd think with the giant array of icons, icon selection would be an important part of this process. As far as I can tell the icon you select doesn't show up anywhere. The important thing here is the Display Name box. Again a matter of preference, I call it Pathfinder, you can call it Applefritter, I'd just recommend that you not leave it as "New Group," because this customization actually shows up on your screen when you access the group.

Exit the PowerPoint Options menu, and test out your new PowerPoint pathfinders. The options will stay grayed out until you select at least two shapes.

These options work pretty much the same as in Illustrator. I've already made a poster in PowerPoint utilizing this feature. PowerPoint's pathfinders are functional. They're useful. And yet they're still very much hidden. When I went to see if there were any other tutorials on this topic, I couldn't find any other reference to these features other than a German YouTube video from 2011 with 300 views. (credit to dipanteratuts).

If anyone knows why this feature was hidden, leave a comment. I'd love to hear some explanation. Like I said, I'm pretty love/hate with Microsoft over this whole thing right now. On the one hand, it's really exciting to learn that my most familiar drawing tool is even more powerful than I thought. On the other hand, this feature has been here for at least three years and Microsoft seems to have gone well out of their way to make sure it was only accessible in the least intuitive way possible.

It's weird, is all. The whole thing is weird. Happy pathfinding.

Vector Drawing with PowerPoint

Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 is not the best tool for vector illustration. It's a presentation program, and that's what it's intended for. However, the surprising thing is that it's passably good at both. It can export to .pdf, .png, .gif, .jgp, and as I recently learned, to video formats like .wmv.

PowerPoint has many of the features of more powerful vector editors like Adobe Illustrator, the problem is that they're pretty well hidden. You want a pen tool? Home > Drawing > Autoshape Panel > Curve. It's right under the text boxes and block arrows that people use for creating normal presentations.

The Illustrator Pencil tool is in the same panel in PowerPoint, but it's called Scribble. I get the feeling that some of these drawing tools arose by accident. For example, there's a tool that lets you draw straight lines connected by corner points when you click the screen, but turns into something like the scribble tool when you click and hold. I can't imagine the application for that in an illustration, but it makes sense if you're trying to connect two unusually placed points of data in a presentation.

And once you've drawn a shape, the editing tools available are incredible. You can edit anchor points, arrange the shape order, select grouping options, and just look at the shape format menu.

Every conveivable effect you could think to apply is in that left bar, and they're actually pretty well fleshed out in terms of variability. It even has raster editing options (Everything in the left bar from Picture Corrections down to Crop).

And because everything is drawn in vector, any necessary touch-ups can be done in other programs. You can save your design as a .pdf in PowerPoint and open it in Illustrator. Or, most surprising to me, you can just copy your selection from PowerPoint and paste right into a waiting artboard in Illustrator.

Where PowerPoint differs from drawing programs like Illustrator is its focus on presentations. In some areas, this causes drawbacks. There are no blob brush tools or pathfinder selections. Pattern fills are very limited, and text cannot be converted to shapes. However, because it's a presentation software, it brings with it something new: a library of animation effects and an audio recorder.

Here's a short thing I made to test the animation abilities of PowerPoint.

It's sloppy, but it gets the point across. In addition to regular movement paths, a number of slide transition animations can be applied to shapes. And all of it can be edited on a functional and precise timeline. Here's the timeline from the above animation.

I only recently started using the Adobe suite as part of my schoolwork, and I'm amazed at some of the capabilities of those programs. There is no doubt in my mind that Illustrator is better for professional design than PowerPoint. But as a veteran PowerPointer, there are some features I've grown used to that I feel are missing in Illustrator. Namely, the Format Painter and enclosed selections.

The Format painter is a tool in PowerPoint that lets you highlight an object and transfer all its format to a new shape. For example, let's say you have a rectangle with a 6-point dashed gradient line, two directions of drop shadow, and a 16° diagonal 3D rotation and you want all that on a circle. Just click the rectangle, click the Format Painter, and click the circle. Done. Maybe I've overlooked something, but I have yet to find that feature in Illustrator. The closest I can find is the Eyedropper tool, but so far as I can tell it only applies the fill color.

Enclosed selections were probably the biggest shock to my system. In PowerPoint, if you want a bunch of shapes selected at once, you drag the selection box to surround the shapes. This lets you select details within a large object.

Here's the selection process in PowerPoint:

And here it is in Illustrator:

Illustrator doesn't have an option to select only the shapes enclosed. Instead, everything the selection box touches is selected. So in this particular instance, instead of clicking and dragging once to make my selection, I would have to shift click nine times to select only the circles (or just deselect the rectangle, but that isn't always feasible). It's annoying, is all. Especially on projects with a higher amount of detail. Something on this sort of scale, for example.

If I want to do a quick, simple project, most times I'll still go to PowerPoint, just because it's an environment I'm more familiar with. The title banner of this site was made in PowerPoint. I'm sure that over time I'll become more accustomed to the Adobe suite. I sure hope I'll become more accustomed to it. That is one of the things I'm looking to get out of my Intro to Illustrator class, anyway.

That's all for today, folks! Tune in next week for another exciting look at the world of drawing programs, where we'll take a look at how Microsoft Paint is totally comparable to Adobe PhotoShop! (We won't and it isn't.)

See you then!