Many people who work with the Microsoft Office suit find that Excel is one of the most important and valuable applications in the collection. This is because people use Microsoft Excel for many purposes: most of them use it for its main, spreadsheet generating function, but others also use the program’s other features: the graphics and charts modules. Sometimes you may need to insert an image into your worksheet. Microsoft Excel is very flexible in this respect, as it allows you to insert, modify and edit almost any type of image file. You can also insert sounds or movie clips into your worksheets.

If you need to insert a clip art image, all you have to do is to go Insert > Picture > Clip Art. You can insert any of the already present clip arts or you can browse your hard drive to find the image file you need (you can also use Excel’s search function to look automatically for the desired image in your hard drive). To do this, go ahead and select Insert> Picture > From File on the menu bar.

If you choose to insert the existing clip arts, you have to navigate through the Clip Art’s dialog window until you reach the desired image ad click Insert. Once you have selected and inserted an image file on your worksheet, you can work with it as it is or you can edit it, change its parameters. First you need to activate the image (by clicking once on the image). You will see nine handles around the image. By clicking and moving them, you can stretch or compress the image to fit any size on the worksheet you require. Microsoft Excel offers you a Picture toolbar with many more picture-editing options. You will see this toolbar after you have clicked on the image (or choose it by clicking View > Toolbars > Picture). You can use this picture toolbar to insert a picture (a clip art from the program or an image from the hard drive), to transform the image by grey scale or black and white (by working with the image control setting). You can increase or decrease the image’s contrast and brightness levels (by adjusting the More/Less Contrast/Brightness settings). You can also crop the image (delete the unnecessary parts of it) or add a variety of borders to the image (by working with the Line Style setting). Excel also offers you multiple ways to modify the way the worksheet text wraps around the graphic (by choosing the options from the Text Wrapping button).

Microsoft Excel also allows you to insert a great array of autoshapes to the worksheet (geometric shapes, all kinds of arrows, flow chart elements or other graphic elements).You can activate the autoshapes toolbar: Insert > Picture > AutoShapes or by selecting View > Toolbars > Autoshapes.

By using this toolbar, you can draw lines on the worksheet (straight lines, arrows or double-ended arrows. You can also draw curved lines or a freeform shape by selecting the curved lines option from the menu). You can also connect flow chart elements by choosing Connectors. There are a series of basic shapes to chose from (both 2D and 3D) or (2D or 3D) block arrows. All the shapes you chose to insert can be rotated or zoomed in and out. The More AutoShapes option offers you even more graphic elements to insert in your worksheet.