How To Draw A Curved Arrow In Word 2010

Using arrows in your Microsoft Word document are a good way to bring your reader’s attention to a particular point. Straight arrows are good, arrows with kinks and corners in them might work, but sometimes a curved arrow is just what the doctor ordered. One of the reasons that curved arrows are so good is that they can bend around other important elements in your document and avoid obscuring them.

There are shapes that you can draw in Word that give you an arrow, but they are either straight line arrows or curved arrows that are curved in strange ways. There are also block arrows, but if you want a simple curve with an arrow on the end, you are stuck.

Actually, you aren’t stuck, because you can use the following secret method to create a curved arrow.

Creating A Curved Arrow

First of all we will draw a curved line. Click Insert > Illustrations > Shapes and choose one of the curved lines. You could draw an arc or a curve for this:

Curved Line In Word 2010

For this exercise, we’ll use a curve (the first highlighted shape in the image above). Click once where you want the arrow to start and then click again where you want the arrow to end. Don’t worry about curving the line at the moment; a straight line is fine. You’ll find that the end of the line follows your cursor around, curving the line this way and that. Don’t panic! Press the escape key to stop drawing and you will be left with a straight(ish) line.

Draw a line in word

Perfect.

We now need to edit the line’s points to give it the kind of curve we want. With the line still selected, you should see the Drawing Tools tab in the ribbon and the Format tab within that. Staying on the Format tab, go to the Shape Styles group and click Shape Outline > Arrows, and select an arrow style.

Add Arrows To A Line In Word

That’s the arrow added, but the line isn’t quite right yet. We need to make it more curved. With the line still selected, click Edit Shape > Edit Points (in the Shape Styles group). Click on one of the points at the end of the line to activate it and you’ll notice that a direction handle appears. If you drag that, you can alter the size and orientation of the curve.

Drag THis

You can also change the size and style of the arrow by clicking Shape Outline > Arrows > More Arrows, and change the Begin size or End size, depending on which arrow you want to change (the one at the start of the line or the one at the end).

Make the arrow bigger in Word

Here is the arrow we made:

The finished arrowI know, you’re impressed.

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