Under Lines, choose a connector line such as the Curved Arrow Connector. On the Format tab, in the Insert Shapes group, click a Flow chart shape. Before you create a flow chart, add a drawing canvas by clicking the Insert tab, clicking Shapes in the Illustrations group, and then clicking New Drawing Canvas. Note: If you want to apply a color and gradient that aren't available in the Shape Styles group, select the color first, and then apply the gradient.Īdd flow charts with connectors. On the Format tab, in the Insert Shapes group, expand the shapes options by clicking the arrow. On the Format tab in the Arrange group, click Group so that all of the shapes will be treated like a single object.ĭraw in the document. Select several shapes at a time by pressing CTRL on your keyboard and clicking each shape you want to include in the group. Click the shape you where you want text, and then type. On the Format tab, in the Insert Shapes group, click Edit Shape, point to Change Shape, and then choose a different shape.Īdd text to a shape. On the Format tab, in the Insert Shapes group, click a shape, and then click somewhere in the document.Ĭhange a shape. You can do any of the following on the Format tab, which appears after you insert a drawing shape: On the Insert tab, in the Illustrations group, click Shapes. Microsoft will begin a preview of Loop's application, workspaces and documents in the first half of next year, Spataro said.Click in your document where you want to create the drawing. The idea for the app came from Microsoft employees who were using Loop components internally and realized it was hard to locate and organize them, Spataro said. People can reach multiple pages from a workspace.Įven though Loop promotes the presentation of information across various programs, Microsoft will provide a dedicated Loop application where people can quickly get to Loop content. These are areas where people can check progress on shared initiatives and enter reactions, as a casual hub for project management. The user interface shows other users' cursors to give a sense of what people are doing in the document right at a given moment, similar to the redesigned Whiteboard digital brainstorming app in Office. These are full-on documents in which people can type text, enter reactions and find related Loop components, links and documents. Third-party developers will be able to build Loop components, too. Microsoft has developed ready-to-use Loop components for voting on ideas and tracking the status of projects, and the company said a Loop component could also be as robust as a customer record drawn from the Dynamics 365 cloud service for tracking sales opportunities. Components stay up to date across different applications, so people don't have to worry about sharing the latest version of a file. They're coming first to OneNote, Outlook and Teams, starting this month. Drawing on the Fluid Framework technology that Microsoft first talked about in 2019, Loop components can appear in multiple Microsoft applications. Multiple people can simultaneously read and contribute to these miniature documents. Cisco's Webex, Salesforce's Slack and Zoom have all developed enhancements to better accommodate hybrid work.Ĭomponents. That's important now that the pandemic has pushed many organizations to adopt remote work at a greater scale. The combination of communication and creation is more well suited to hybrid work configurations, where not everyone is located in the same physical space, Spataro said. "Essentially what we're doing with Loop is we're blowing up the document," he said. Users can quickly discuss Loop projects by kicking off voice or video calls in Teams, which has grown to more than 250 million monthly active users following the onset of Covid-19, he said. Workers can share Loop elements in Teams text conversations.
Loop promises a modern alternative, which is important because Microsoft's core productivity software increasingly faces pressure from well-funded start-ups such as Airtable, Coda and Notion, which aren't weighed down by proprietary file formats.Įmerging productivity software from those companies can handle content creation, but they're lacking in communication, said Jared Spataro, a Microsoft corporate vice president. And the SharePoint tool gives workers online hubs for accessing relevant files. Microsoft's Office subscription bundles already come with Word and Excel, where people can be co-authors on text documents and spreadsheets.