Using CC Libraries in Word and PowerPoint

This article appeared in Issue 3 of CreativePro Magazine.

If you’ve ever had to put together a PowerPoint presentation for a client, or craft a design proposal in Word with assets that were created in your Adobe apps, I have some great news for you: CC Libraries are now available directly in Microsoft Office. This is something that could save you a ton of time, and delight your non-designer colleagues who need to be sure their reports and presentations are on-brand.

The rationale behind this unlikely alliance is laid out on the scant Adobe Help page: “Use the Add-in to integrate your brand designs and assets to your presentations, reports, brochures, and branding and marketing collaterals.”

Installing the Add-ins

Figure 1. The landing page for the CC Libraries Add-ins

You can install either Add-in (or both) directly from this page at the Office.com website. Just choose the one you want to install first (Figure 1), and go from there. Alternatively, use the Get Add-ins feature from the Insert tab on the ribbon in either app (Figure 2).

Figure 2. The Get Add-ins tab on the ribbon

Whichever method you choose, after you install the CC Libraries panel you must activate it by logging in with your Adobe ID. You have to do this only once. The login applies to both apps and presumably any others that become available, such as Excel.

While logged in, your CC Libraries appear much as they do in the Libraries panels of your CC apps, but conveniently bigger and easier to read (Figure 3). Once installed, the new panel makes all the usable assets in your CC Libraries available to Word or PowerPoint. The definition of usable in this context is broader than you might expect. Besides the usual image formats, it includes Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign graphics, in addition to text and text styles from Illustrator or InDesign.

Figure 3. The CC Libraries panel in Word

“Well,” you may be thinking. “That sounds like a combination made in Frankenstein’s lab.” In fact, although the specific “help and how-to” information is skimpy, the CC Libraries Add-in works surprisingly well. It’s early days yet, considering that CC Libraries as a whole are still evolving rapidly. It will be interesting to see how they develop.

How the CC Library Add-ins Work

From working with Libraries in InDesign or Illustrator, you are probably used to adding elements by dragging and dropping, but the Office Add-in works a little differently. Whether it’s worse or better is a matter of personal assessment, but I think it’s a little of both. Right-click a thumbnail and choose a Place command for graphics, or just single-click for text styles, color swatches, or text snippets.

The Search function works the same as in the Libraries panel you’re familiar with from CC apps, including the option to search in Adobe Stock and add previews or license items directly from the panel.

Placing graphics

To place an image in PowerPoint or Word, right-click it in the panel and choose Place Graphic from the context menu (Figure 4). The same goes for vector graphics (including Illustrator files) and text snippets.

Figure 4. Right-click to place a graphic.

You have a choice to place vector graphics as vectors by choosing Place as Vector from the context menu (Figure 5). Don’t get too excited, though. This is quite hit or miss—more miss than hit, in fact. SVG outlines will place fine; most other vectors just… won’t. No reason given, no error message, the action simply doesn’t do anything.

Figure 5. For vector art, you can choose Place as Vector.

The Golden Gate Bridge illustration I used here is a vector file from Adobe Stock that I added to My Library some time ago, and I can place it as vectors. But the same file, when added to a Library as a newly downloaded file or added directly from Adobe Stock, will not place as a vector, only as a raster image. Even when explicitly saved as an EPS, a format long understood by Office apps, it doesn’t work.

After playing around with as many variations as I could think of, I wasn’t able to hit on a way to make even the simplest vector created in Illustrator accessible to Office as a vector graphic—unless I first exported it as SVG and used Bridge to place that version in a Library. That does work reliably, however, so the workaround isn’t too hard.

When Place as Vector works, it does open up possibilities. Figure 6 shows the example graphic placed in PowerPoint as a vector. When you select a vector graphic, the Graphics Format tab appears above the ribbon. This tab is the same in both Word and PowerPoint, and it lets you change the vector’s fill and stroke (“outline” in Office-speak), add effects, and resize it. Before you can do more, such as ungroup it into individual elements for formatting, there’s an extra step.

Figure 6. The Graphics Format ribbon appears when you select a vector object.

On the left end of the Graphics Format ribbon is an icon labeled Convert to Shape (Figure 7). (Like me, you probably thought it was a shape already, but hey, this is Microsoft. What do we know?) When you choose this option, the original bounding box (based, as far as I can tell, on the artboard) goes away.

Figure 7. Convert to Shape on the Graphics Format ribbon

Here is where Word and PowerPoint seem to differ. In Word, the graphic elements are automatically ungrouped. In PowerPoint, they are not. In either case, the option on the top-level menu changes to Shape Format.

In PowerPoint, you can ungroup the various elements in the graphic by using the Group option in the Shape Format ribbon (Figure 8). That step is unavailable in Word, because the ungrouping has already happened.

Figure 8. Ungroup shows up in PowerPoint only.

Whether you ungroup or not, you can now color the fill and stroke (“outline”) independently and add any of the other effects that Office makes available. Colors from the CC Library have no effect, only those applied from what the Office app makes available.

All is not lost, however. In PowerPoint, you can use the Eyedropper tool in the Shape Fill and Shape Outline color menus to grab color from a swatch or a graphic in the Library panel (Figure 9). The Eyedropper tool works the same way as its equivalent in Photoshop or InDesign: Hold and drag the Eyedropper tool to the part of the screen where the color appears, then let go.

Figure 9. The Eyedropper tool lets you pick any color from the screen.

Text styles

Here’s a surprise, given the limitations of graphics handling: Paragraph and character styles added to a Library from InDesign can be applied to text with a single click. The paragraph styles shown in Figure 10 are from a completely unrelated project I’m working on in InDesign. (Any resemblance to real corporations, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.) Styling text with them is as simple as placing the cursor anywhere in a paragraph and clicking the style, with the result you see (Figure 11).

Figure 10. Unstyled text doesn’t know what’s about to happen.

Figure 11. One click applies a style to a paragraph.

There are some limitations. More advanced character formats such as OpenType All Small Caps don’t work in Office apps, despite their claim to support OpenType. Bold and Italic work as expected, but Office doesn’t understand Black, Semibold, or other style variations. Similarly, Word and PowerPoint simply ignore drop caps and nested styles when you apply a paragraph style that includes them.

If a font defined in an InDesign paragraph or character style is not installed on the user’s system, the CC Libraries panel in Word or PowerPoint will show the orange “font missing” icon next to that style (Figure 12). Be sure that fonts used for any text styles in a shared Library are available anywhere the Library will be used.

Figure 12. The orange icon means the font defined in the style is missing.

Text snippets

You can insert text snippets from InDesign or Illustrator into a Word document with a single click. Just put the cursor where you want the text to appear in Word or PowerPoint, and click the snippet in the Library.

Both point text and area text from Illustrator work as expected, as does text from InDesign. Office apps know only Regular, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic styles for any given font, so if your snippet uses Semibold Condensed Italic it will come in as Regular. The color is retained, but because this is MS Office it will be converted to RGB if it started life in CMYK.

An InDesign paragraph with drop cap and nested or line styles will import without the drop cap or the nested style(s). Similarly, any esoteric text formatting in Illustrator, such as adjustments with the Touch Type tool, will save in the Library but won’t appear in the Word or PowerPoint document.

Text from Photoshop is treated as a graphic. There is no option to place it as text or a vector.

Some stuff just doesn’t work

Many items you may have in your CC Libraries are meaningless to Office apps. Patterns, color themes, brushes, or 3D models don’t translate into any format Word or PowerPoint can use, so they are dimmed in the panel. You can move or copy them within your Libraries, but you can’t use them in Office. Video is also unavailable, even when the video is a format that PowerPoint can display.

Adding to a Library

In Word, but not PowerPoint, you can add text and styles to the current Library. Select a few characters in the text, then use the + icon at the bottom of the Library panel and choose whether to add the paragraph style, a character style, the color, the text, or all of the above (Figure 13). Notice that the empty Paragraph Styles group in the figure has a message telling you to drag and drop items to add them to the group. This applies only to items already in the Library; you can’t drag and drop from Word.

Figure 13. Choose what to add from selected text in Word.

Managing CC Libraries in Office

Most of the same functions for managing a Library in a CC app work as expected, although “some limitations apply.” Possibly the most welcome news is that you can share a Library as View Only, which will be a relief to any in-house design team creating a Library for non-designers, even tech-challenged colleagues.

Within the CC Libraries panel itself, you can add and delete items, group them into folders, and copy, move, or rename things just as you would in a CC app. The main panel menu is similar to what you are familiar with from InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, or XD (Figure 14).

Figure 14. The panel menu is familiar to CC users.

The same Sort and Group By menu for an open Library that you’ll find in a regular Libraries panel allows grouping by Type (you don’t get to choose what classifies as a Type) or by Custom Group (Figure 15).

Figure 15. Group By and Sort By are the same as in CC apps.

There’s a caution here. CC Libraries as a whole seem to be in a state of flux about grouping Library items, and I had an entire group of paragraph styles disappear from a Library during my testing. The panels formerly listed separate Character Style and Paragraph Style groups, but now it seems the Libraries lump them together as Typography—or sometimes not. For now, use caution with text or text styles.

As with the Libraries panel in a regular CC app, you can view items as a grid of thumbnails or as a list via the icon in the top right of an open Library (Figure 16).

Figure 16. These are the familiar view options.

A Hidden Extra

One item that is unique to the Office version of CC Libraries is a sometimes-hidden extra menu in the Libraries menu title bar. A shy little triangle appears if you click anywhere on the bar except the panel menu “hamburger.” Click the triangle to reveal this bonus menu, which includes a Reload option missing from regular CC Libraries panels (Figure 17).

Figure 17. An extra menu unique to the Office Add-ins

Reload forces a complete refresh of the panel contents. If you suspect the content of the panel isn’t fully up to date, use this.

Get Support takes you to the Adobe help page, which begins, illogically enough, with a description of the system requirements and installation instructions, even though you reached it from the already installed panel. It does have simple usage instructions for both PowerPoint and Word if you scroll down far enough.

Security Info assures you that it is connected to the web via SSL, and Attach Debugger presumably is useful for developers.

Who Will Use It?

The presentation on Microsoft’s site makes the Add-in’s intent clear: to make it easier for the regular staff of a corporation to use branding assets and styles created by an in-house design group or outside agency. Having a CC Libraries panel is also useful for any designer building PowerPoint slide decks for clients, however, because they probably already have asset Libraries for each client.

Even writers using Word may find the Add-in a useful way to keep a set of editorially mandated styles handy in a CC Library (hello, Mike). Style sets can be saved as individual Libraries.

The CC Libraries Add-in will be more useful if the vector graphics anomalies can be ironed out, but in the meantime we have a handy way to collaborate with clients, authors, and in-house corporate staff.