Polygon

The Polygon draws an equal-sided shape inside the box you define with two clicks. The number of sides is a setting rather than a tool, which is a deliberate choice: which polygon a desk standardises on for a given meaning varies, and shipping four near-identical tools would grow the palette by a row that most people never touch while still not covering the fifth case someone wants.

The vertices are placed on the ellipse inscribed in the box, not on a circle, so the polygon stretches with the frame. That is what makes it usable on a chart at all — a shape locked to a circle would be unable to fit a wide, shallow region, which is the shape most chart features actually have. A hexagon flattened across thirty bars is still recognisably a hexagon.

One vertex always sits at the top of the box. Keeping the rotation fixed means a hexagon drawn today and a hexagon drawn next week look identical, so the silhouette can carry meaning; a shape whose orientation drifted with its proportions could not.

1. 1
   Select the Polygon tool

   Choose Polygon from the Shapes group in the drawing toolbar.
2. 2
   Click one corner

   Place the first point at one corner of the region the polygon should occupy.
3. 3
   Click the opposite corner

   Place the second point diagonally opposite. The polygon fills the box between them.
4. 4
   Set the side count

   Open the popup and step Sides up or down. The shape rebuilds in place, so the region you framed is preserved.
5. 5
   Adjust

   Drag either handle to resize. The side count is unaffected by resizing.

• A second vocabulary of zones — a chart already carrying four rectangles cannot distinguish them by silhouette, only by colour, and colour is usually spoken for. Switching a class of zones to hexagons gives you a second channel that survives monochrome printing.
• Desk conventions — a team can standardise a side count per meaning: hexagons for supply and demand, octagons for scheduled events, pentagons for anything provisional. The shape becomes the legend.
• Category over magnitude — a polygon says "this is a thing of type X" where a rectangle says "price between here and here". Use it when the classification matters more than the exact boundaries.
• Node diagrams on a chart — when annotating a sequence of events, polygons make better nodes than rectangles because they read as discrete objects rather than as price ranges.
• Flattened badges — stretched wide and shallow, a hexagon makes a compact banner over a span of bars without the "this is a support zone" implication a rectangle carries.

• 1.The Visual Display of Quantitative Information — Edward R. Tufte
• 2.Semiology of Graphics — Jacques Bertin