How To Get Your Poop Straight in Powerpoint
I now draw your attention to a little-seen, little-understood feature in Powerpoint.
First off, make sure the drawing toolbar is showing. View —> Toolbars —> Drawing. It will probably be on the bottom of your window.
Now, put a few shapes or something on the slide. Anything will do, but make them visible enough so you can understand what’s going on.
Now, hold down Shift and click on the objects you want to mess with. If you’re just working on a demo, you can select everything with Ctrl+A. You can also draw a box by dragging with the left mouse button down.
Now, click the Draw button on the drawing toolbar. Go to Align or Distribute. Hit Align Center. They now share a central y-axis! It works on all dimensions. Distribute is awesome, too. Especially if you’re tiling something and one gap looks bigger than another. Goofing around is the best way to get a feel for this.
Now, this is all well and good, but the real feature is unlocked with the “Relative to Slide” option. When this is checked, you can select just one (multiple is still allowed) object and click Align Center or something, and it will line up the object(s) with the slide itself. How many times has it been necessary to make sure a chart is in the dead center of the slide? Just hit Align Middle and Align Center once Relative to Slide is checked.
Another cool thing is that you can “tear off” these types of secondary toolbars. Click on Draw again and hover over Align or Distribute. See the blue bar on top of the sub-window that pops up with all the align menu items? Grab on that and tug it upward into the main Powerpoint window. Now it’s a separate toolbar. Once you’ve dropped it into the workspace you can then dock it onto the main top or bottom toolbar by dragging it up to the top of the window. I put mine right beside the Formatting toolbar (next to the animation and Common Tasks buttons).
Also, while you’re at it, hit Draw, go to Snap, and make sure the “To Shape” is depressed. I can’t believe I haven’t seen that before, but it’s a really good way to get lines and shapes to push up to other shapes.
Along the same lines are the Connector AutoShapes, which deserve to be much more prominently featured than they are. Go to the AutoShapes menu within the drawing toolbar and hover over Connectors. I would at least tear off that toolbar to be floating whenever you’re working with these.
Draw two squares or something a little distance apart on the slide. Click the one way arrow (“straight arrow connector”) button to start.
Normal drawing crosshair, right? Nope. Hover over the edge of one of the boxes. There should be blue dots at the sides’ midpoints and a new kind of crosshair. Click on one of the blue dots. Now do the same thing over on the other box.
When you move one of the boxes now, the connector stays attached and aligned. How many presentations have you seen where this is done manually with line segments and arrows?
The elbow and bendy arrows are much better for visuals.
One last thing within the alignment theme: I used to put text boxes inside AutoShapes and then group the objects when I was done getting everything set up. You can actually right-click any AutoShape that has an area (like a box or star) and click “Add Text.” Then, just type into the middle of the shape.
Once you have some text in there, you can do some tuning with the “Text Box” tab of the AutoShape’s properties, including getting the text to go flush with the bottom or top of the shape. The typical text alignment buttons on the Formatting toolbar work for horizontal alignment. You can mess with margins, and one of the best features is the ability to get the text to go vertical with the “Rotate text within the Autoshape” option.