Have you ever seen some article with huge chunk of text? How appealing was it to you?

Probably not that much. Frankly speaking, when I see such a piece, I just don’t read the text in the first instance. I quickly scroll through it, look to the pictures, tables or other interesting bits and then I decide whether I would read it or not.

So ILLUSTRATION is a CRITICAL POINT—that makes your reports, e-mails, articles or presentations more readable and interesting. You know, people just don’t want to read lengthy stuff—they preferred to see pictures or tables instead.

Thus if you would like your reports to grab attention and be read, then you should probably insert some stuff in it—pictures, tables, figures, graphs, etc.

Now I will show you how to do it using well hidden Snipping Tool in your Windows. So what does it do?

It works just like a camera. It captures a snapshot of your selected area and you can place this snapshot where you want. It works really nice when it comes to making reports, presentations, or even when you want to show some extract of your excel to your colleague.

So how to do it?

  1. Find the Snipping Tool and open it. Click the Start button on the bottom left corner of your screen, then select All programs box and find Accessories.Snipping Tool is located in Accessories section, so click to open it.
  2. Select the area in Excel (or anywhere else) that you want to copy. You can select either rectangle area, or just free-form area—that’s your choice. Most of the time rectangle works nice.
  3. Place it where you want. Now, selected area appeared in Snipping Tool as a snip. You can now highlight something in it or draw something there.When you are done, click Edit, then Copy and… paste it where you want. That’s it.

For the short demonstration and few ideas, please see this free video:

What are your tips and tricks to make reports more interesting? Please tell us in the comments section.