East Carolina University
 Department of Psychology

Using the Drawing Tool In MS Word
   You have pasted a plot of group means from SAS into Word and now you want to draw the lines connecting the means.  This can be done in Word, although the quality of the plot will not be as good as it would be if you used MS Graph or Excel or another program specifically designed to prepare line graphs.

    If the drawing toolbar is not already displayed near the bottom of the screen, make it appear by clicking the drawing icon on the tool bar at top or by clicking View, Toolbars, Drawing. The drawing tool bar should then appear.

    Click the straight line just to the right of "AutoShapes." Now position the cursor on the leftmost "point" on the line segment you wish to draw. Hold down the left mouse button and drag the line to the next point to the right, then release the mouse button. Click the line icon on the drawing tool bar again and draw another line from the second  mean to the third mean. Continue this process until you have completed the line. If you wish, you can also add text to label the line.

    When you first start to draw a line, Word may annoy you by presenting a drawing canvas (it says "create your drawing here).  Just hit the escape key before you start to draw and it will disappear.  You can stop Word from presenting the drawing canvas in the first place by clicking Tool, Options, General and then unchecking the box shown below.

 

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Dr. Karl L. Wuensch



This page most recently revised on 20. April 2008.