Nor was there any of the hoity-toity exclusivity of so-called “draw” programs, with their fixation on accurate coordinates and vectors, which aimed to be serious tools for engineers and designers, rather than a plaything for ordinary folks. Another few clicks and those shapes would fill with color (or, early on, grayscale).

An ordinary person could sit there, at their brand new family PC, and, with a few swoops, drags and clicks, create weird cubist configurations of overlapping shapes. So was the computer mouse, which Paint served as a primary demonstration of. Years before the Pixar movies, and not all that far removed from computers being viewed as the sinister tools of a shadowy technocracy, the very idea of making art with a computer seemed like some kind of an affront to common decency.Īnd yet it was possible. It emerged at a time when the graphical user interface was new. There is something endearingly no-nonsense about Paint. It'll remain included in Windows 10 for now.īut why exactly is the tech world so in love with a piece of software that has barely changed in more than 30 years? Does it still have any real place here in the futuristic wonderland that is 2019? And what, if anything, can we learn from its stickiness? Getting down to basics “For now,” he added, with what I personally like to imagine as an “I’ll get you next time, Gadget,” Dr. Microsoft just teased its next big Windows 11 updateĬan’t get the Windows 11 22H2 update? There could be a good reason why Undo is your friend as always but it doesn’t make life easy.It’s not just you: Microsoft confirms Windows 11 is having gaming issues Once you click outside the selection you set the text. Once rotated, you can still manipulate the text while it is still selected. You cannot manually increment the rotation, you have the option for Right 90, Left 90, Rotate 180, Flip vertical and Flip horizontal. Select the Select tool in the Ribbon and draw a box around the text.You cannot select the text in isolation and rotate it. Rotation only works for the image as a whole so when placing text you will want to rotate you need to place it over an area you can rotate without it spoiling the image. With MS Paint, you don’t use layers so you have to work a little harder.

As you would normally add text as a layer you can then customize it to your heart’s content. Rotating text is something we take for granted as super simple in other editing programs.

Add layers to ms paint