Star

The Star draws an alternating outer-and-inner vertex path inside the box you define with two clicks. Its purpose is narrow and worth stating plainly: it is the highest-salience mark on the palette, the one that answers "where do I look first?" on a chart already carrying a dozen annotations.

It earns its place over a text emoji because it scales with the region rather than sitting at a fixed pixel size. An emoji marker points at one bar and stays the same size at every zoom level; a star can enclose a whole area of interest, and it grows and shrinks with the chart the way the rest of the drawing does. It is also a real shape, so it takes the same stroke, fill and line-style controls as everything else rather than being locked to a font glyph.

Like the polygon, the vertices sit on the ellipse inscribed in the box, so the star can be flattened to fit a wide, shallow region instead of being locked to a circle. One spike always points at the top of the box, which keeps the shape recognisable at any proportion.

1. 1
   Select the Star tool

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

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

   Place the second point diagonally opposite. The star fills the box between them.
4. 4
   Tune the shape

   Open the popup to change Spikes and Spike depth. Both rebuild the star in place, leaving the box you framed alone.
5. 5
   Adjust

   Drag either handle to resize. Spike count and depth are unaffected by resizing.

• The trade of the week — on a review chart carrying a dozen annotations, one star answers "where do I look first?" without any reading. That is the whole job, and nothing else on the palette does it as directly.
• The bar a thesis turned on — the print that confirmed or broke the idea. A star scales with the region, so it can enclose the bar and its context rather than pointing at a single candle.
• Rating and ranking — several stars at different sizes rank setups by conviction. Size is read faster than any label.
• Teaching charts — mark the moment a lesson lands. Readers scan for the star before they read the text, which is exactly the order you want.
• Burst emphasis — a high spike count with shallow depth makes a starburst, useful for a news spike or a volatility event where the connotation is impact rather than merit.

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