More Power to You
Microsoft PowerPoint
Tips
The Line-up
PowerPoint has a
flexible set of drawing tools that can help you create
interesting designs and illustrations. But if you create
several elements in a slide, such as components in a flow
chart or an organization chart, you’ll want
to line up the elements vertically or horizontally.
Here are some tips to help you do that.
- 1. Turn
on your guides. To do that, click View and Guides.
You turn the feature off the same way. (I use this
feature often, so I have the icon on my toolbar for
easy access. See the “Tool Time” article
in this series.)
The initial guides display consists
of a vertical and a horizontal dotted line, each centered,
crossing at the center of the slide. When this feature
is selected, objects “snap” to
the guides. That means the guides attract the objects,
almost as a magnet would. It makes objects easy to line
up. If you want to relocate the lines, just click and
drag as you would any object. If you have your ruler
selected (View/Ruler),
the scale will indicate your exact guide location.
If you
have a complex drawing, you might need more than one
guide. To duplicate the guides, press Control as
you select your guide and drag it. (You can duplicate
any object this way!) Now you have two horizontal or
vertical guides. You can duplicate each guide up to eight
times. To get rid of the extra guides, drag them off
the screen
- Use
the align and distribute features.
You can use the Align and Distribute tools.
(You’ll find them under Draw/Align
and Distribute, but I have them on my toolbar.).
Here’s
how you use them. Select any objects you want to align
by holding down the Shift key as you
select (click) them. Then press the alignment icon you
want. Terrific, huh? If you choose Align Top,
all objects will align with the object you have selected
that is nearest the top of the screen, and so on for
each alignment option.
If
you want to align an object or group of objects in the
center, right, left, top, or bottom of the screen, choose
the Relative to Slide tool.
Then all selected objects will be aligned in the center
or at the edge of the screen.
If
you want to evenly space your objects, select them as
described above, and choose Distribute
Horizontally or Distribute Vertically. PowerPoint will
evenly space selected objects between the two that are
farthest from the center.
- Snap
to. In
addition to your guides, PowerPoint gives
you two other features to help you position and align objects, “snap
to grid” and “snap to shape” (Draw/Snap).
The grid is an invisible grid behind the PowerPoint screen.
When this feature is selected, you will notice that selected
objects seem to move jerkily when you drag them. They are
actually snapping to the grid.
If
you select snap to shape, objects will snap to each
other. For example, if you draw a series of rectangles,
have snap to shape selected, and drag them close to each
other, the sides will snap together precisely.
With these tools to line up elements, you may find on occasion
that creating boxes for organization charts and even simple
illustrative bar charts more versatile than using the PowerPoint utilities
for those options.
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