Becoming a Clipart Surgeon for PowerPoint Presentations

Inspired in the following idea from Articulate’s blog and revisited from here, “becoming a clipart surgeon” can be a good way to access tons of new clipart for your presentations. We can insert cliparts from Office easily using the Insert Clipart feature in PowerPoint. This can be helpful to decorate your slides.

To become a professional clipart surgeon you’ll need to use the group operations in PowerPoint and shape tools. First, we start adding a simple clipart.

clipart powerpoint

Now you can right click on the clipart image and then choose Group menu and Ungroup. You will be asked to convert the imported image to Microsoft Office Drawing object. Accept the deal and then you are ready to start moving the individual shapes like arm, the legs and head.

figures ppt group

Here we have a slide example showing the clipart or figure with all the elements disconnected.

character ppt

Now you can rearrange the shapes on this slide to form another different figure. A good tip to change the order of shapes or access every shape in the slide is to use the Selection and Visibility pane. This is accessible from the Format menu, under Arrange submenu and then Selection Pane…

animated character figures

In this final example we modified the character clipart to represent anĀ Oriuken gesture like in Mortal Kombat characters.

character clipart