Are you an academic and need to make some beautiful figures for your upcoming paper or thesis? Have you seen some of my slides and wanted to know how I make my figures? Well, I've decided to share my secrets with you, and the truth is that the secret is good old Microsoft PowerPoint.

For several years now, PowerPoint is my go-to tool for drawing high-quality figures. It's just so much easier to use than anything else, easy to share, to maintain, and is perfect for integrating into my slide decks. So I have left Visio, Illustrator, InkScape and the likes behind, and I primarily just use PowerPoint.

In this tutorial, I will show you how I set up my workspace, set my default shapes and lines, make sure my figures are well-aligned, and finally, go over my methodology of how to organize my figures for integration into LaTeX (Overleaf) projects.

The five parts of this tutorial are:
Part 1: Motivation and Workspace Setup
Part 2: Setting default shapes, lines and text boxes
Part 3: Unleashing the power of alignment and grouping
Part 4: Building a simple example and exporting it for article integration
Part 5: Including your figure in Overleaf, cropping it to the right size, and keeping everything in order


This tutorial is given by Prof. Adam Teman of the EnICS Labs Impact Center at Bar-Ilan University, based entirely on personal experience. If you have comments or suggestions, I am always happy to discuss them and learn new things, so please comment below.

You can access all my lectures and download my slides on the EnICS Labs website at:
https://enicslabs.com/education/

You can find my (updated) template for making figures at:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/d7bjfz...

All rights reserved:
Prof. Adam Teman
Emerging nanoscaled Integrated Circuits and Systems (EnICS) Labs
Faculty of Engineering, Bar-Ilan University