Draw and hold - getting Excel to improve your artwork

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More interesting and useful new features being introduced into Excel Part three of a five-part series of blogs
Last month we blogged in detail about the new GROUPBY and PIVOTBY functions in Excel. This month we have 4 lighter new features: focus cells, colour pickers, Draw and Hold and some new templates. More interesting and useful new features being introduced into Excel A new (and very clear) way to show which cell has the focus Draw and hold - getting Excel to improve your artwork (this blog) The new colour picker to ensure good contrast New templates for generating sample data, QR codes and Python help

More interesting and useful new features being introduced into Excel

Part three of a five-part series of blogs

Last month we blogged in detail about the new GROUPBY and PIVOTBY functions in Excel. This month we have 4 lighter new features: focus cells, colour pickers, Draw and Hold and some new templates.

More interesting and useful new features being introduced into Excel
A new (and very clear) way to show which cell has the focus
Draw and hold - getting Excel to improve your artwork (this blog)
The new colour picker to ensure good contrast
New templates for generating sample data, QR codes and Python help

Posted by Andy Brown on 06 December 2024

The Draw and Hold feature has been ported into Excel from Word. Here's what it looks like in action:

Building a boat.

Let's take this more slowly. Suppose that you want to draw a picture of the Titanic:

We're using one of the drawing tools to create an outline of a boat.

Here I've drawn the outline of a boat, but it's a bit rubbish:

A (very) badly drawn boat.

If you now hold your mouse pointer at the end of your drawing for a second or two, Excel will replace your drawing with a relevant autoshape:

Much better! Now to add some masts, people, sea, ...

Here I've added a heart (just because I could):

Irritatingly, the heart isn't quite level.

I doubt this will change anyone's working life, but it's a nice feature and has been well implemented.

Parts of this blog
More interesting and useful new features being introduced into Excel A new (and very clear) way to show which cell has the focus Draw and hold - getting Excel to improve your artwork (this blog) The new colour picker to ensure good contrast New templates for generating sample data, QR codes and Python help