Resizing a Grouped object

[Fred Holmes]

One of the "problems" I've had "forever" (back to Corel Draw on early
Macs) is that if I try to resize a text box, the font size doesn't
"follow", i.e., it doesn't resize as well.

This extends to a problem with grouping a bunch of stuff (shapes), and
then resizing the grouped object (which contains several text boxes).
The text in the text boxes doesn't resize.

Is there a way to get the text in the Text Box to resize with the box?
Change some property of the Text Box? Is there a different shape
(other than a text box) to use to display the text, that would resize
the font along with everything else?

Thanks,

Fred Holmes

I'm using a macro to create a "complicated" (built-up) object
consisting of a background rectangle, several lines dividing it into a
matrix (table?), several text items that are captions (in the generic,
English sense), and several other text items that display data -- data
that, using a macro, is read from an Excel Workbook and posted to the
Powerpoint file. Having created this object with a macro, I want to
be able to (manually) select all of its components by dragging a
rectangle around it, use the group command on the drawing toolbar to
group it, and then move and resize it to the desired appearance while
it is grouped. The size of the font doesn't "behave" when I do that.

[@webshite.org Adam Crowley]

"Fred Holmes" <fho...@schaferdc.com> wrote in message
news:3b85053e...@msnews.microsoft.com...

> One of the "problems" I've had "forever" (back to Corel Draw on early
> Macs) is that if I try to resize a text box, the font size doesn't
> "follow", i.e., it doesn't resize as well.

Ah, Corel DRAW - yes, it depends on whether your text box is 'artistic' or
'paragraph' text.

> This extends to a problem with grouping a bunch of stuff (shapes), and
> then resizing the grouped object (which contains several text boxes).
> The text in the text boxes doesn't resize.
>
> Is there a way to get the text in the Text Box to resize with the box?
> Change some property of the Text Box? Is there a different shape
> (other than a text box) to use to display the text, that would resize
> the font along with everything else?

In PP the font size is changeable by formatting tools only, not by manually
dragging the sizing handles of its containing box.

One thing to try would be to copy the group that you want to resize, then
choose Edit>Paste Special to paste it back into the slide as an Enhanced
Metafile. This should behave as you want it to, until you ungroup it
again - then the text will revert to the font size you created it in...

[Fred Holmes]

On Thu, 23 Aug 2001 15:10:27 +0100, "Adam Crowley" <adam @
webshite.org> wrote:

>One thing to try would be to copy the group that you want to resize, then
>choose Edit>Paste Special to paste it back into the slide as an Enhanced
>Metafile. This should behave as you want it to, until you ungroup it
>again - then the text will revert to the font size you created it in...
>

Well, this almost works. It works for a process in which one is
_manually_ creating a presentation, and the name of the individual
shapes is immaterial. But when the object is ungrouped after the
paste special, all of the component shapes are given (new) generic
names. The specialized names given to each shape by the macro that
creates them (so that the text in the text boxes can be updated with
macro statements) have been lost.

Thanks,

Fred Holmes

[Steve Rindsberg]

Hmmm.

Assuming you're doing all this manipulation under program control, you know
the original size of the object, you change it to something else.

You can also get the original size of the text (assuming it's all one size
... not necessarily a good assumption to make).

You can figure out how much you've scaled up the object. Scale up the
text's font size by the same percentage?

Rough and ready, no doubt needs some further tweakery, but worth looking at
I'd think.