Excel, like all of the Office suite programs, makes extensive use of buttons to allow you to perform some action with the click of a button visible on the screen containing your document. The drawing buttons are grouped together on a Drawing Toolbar which you can choose to make visible or not.

The Drawing toolbar looks like this.

The location is typically docked at the bottom of the screen below the document. Note there are several buttons with down-arrows indicating choices. We will begin our exploration of the Drawing Toolbar with the action you take to make the toolbar visible/hidden.

The command to adjust the toolbars is found under the View+Toolbar from the main menu.

The checkmarks beside the different toolbars indicates the checked toolbar is currently visible. The lack of a check means the toolbar is hidden.

In order to make a toolbar visible, simply select one that has no checkmark. To hide a toolbar, simply select one that has a checkmark.

We generally suggest always keeping the Standard, Format, and Drawing toolbars out and hiding the others until you have a project which makes using the toolbar useful. Each toolbar takes up a little document space. The smaller the document space, the more scrolling you will have to do to see your spreadsheet.

The most commonly used drawing tools are displayed on the toolbar itself. These are the line, arrow, oval, and rectangle. We will begin exploring the features of the line tool. Many of the attributes of the line tool are also available for the arrow tool.

Once the line button is selected, you can draw on the spreadsheet. The drawn object will sit "on top" of the spreadsheet. If you conceptualize the drawing to be made on transparent paper placed on top of your document, you will have the idea of how Excel handles layers with drawings.

You start by clicking on a starting point and dragging to a new place on the spreadsheet. When you release the mouse, you will have a line segment with handlebar "dots" on the end. You may click on either end and drag to a new location. The line segment's direction will change to reflect your new movement. In this way, the length of the line may be increased or decreased.

The line itself has attributes that you can adjust to your liking. You may change the color and you may change the line style in two ways. The process is to first select the object with a click and then select the attributes.

Clicking on the down-arrow for the Line Color lets you select the appropriate color for the line.	Clicking on the Line Style button lets you select from the different styles of line.	Clicking on the Line Segment button lets you choose from the different options for displaying your line in segments.

These attribute-adjusting features are important because they also let you control the same features of lines in other drawn objects. For example, you could draw a square and adjust the attributes of the lines of the square.

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