Alignment guides

Quick reference

• 00:05 You would be surprised and shocked how many times I have reviewed a slide
• 00:08 deck that contains objects that are misaligned.
• 00:11 What do I mean by misaligned?
• 00:13 Let's take this slide as an example.
• 00:15 There are two objects on this slide.
• 00:17 On the surface, many would say that they are aligned vertically with each other but
• 00:22 when you look closely, you can see that they actually aren't.
• 00:25 Still can't see it?
• 00:27 Let select some empty space on the slide to create a temporary line.
• 00:31 If the objects were aligned vertically,
• 00:33 they would both be selected at the same time.
• 00:35 Since they aren't aligned, they won't be selected at the same time.
• 00:39 To be clear, the problem here is not that they are selected at different times as we
• 00:42 are designing our slide, it's that they should be aligned, but they aren't.
• 00:47 This is a lack of attention to detail.
• 00:49 Keynote has a really, really cool tool built in to help avoid these visual
• 00:53 mistakes, and to keep our objects aligned with other like objects.
• 00:57 Let's clear the screen so I can show you a few examples.
• 01:01 First let's add a single object to our canvas.
• 01:04 By default, that object will be placed in the exact center of our canvas.
• 01:09 As we move the object around on our canvas,
• 01:11 you will notice some yellow lines that seem to appear from time to time.
• 01:15 These are our alignment guides The vertical alignment guide will confirm when
• 01:19 we are aligned to the center of the canvas, horizontally.
• 01:23 Not only will this show you visually, but the object will actually snap into place.
• 01:28 And if you happen to be using a Magic Trackpad 2,
• 01:30 like I am, you will also feel the feedback in your fingers.
• 01:34 Very cool.
• 01:35 The horizontal alignment guide will confirm when we are aligned to the center
• 01:39 of the canvas vertically, with the same feedback.
• 01:43 Let's move this object off center, just a little bit, and add another object.
• 01:47 As we move this object around our slide,
• 01:49 you can see the guidelines as we saw before, which
• 01:52 will confirm when the object is centered on the slide horizontally and vertically.
• 01:58 In addition to these guides, we have a new set of
• 02:00 alignment guides that are relative to the first object that we placed on the slide.
• 02:05 Keynote is smart enough to let us know when a second object is in alignment
• 02:09 with another object,
• 02:10 because in most cases we want to align those two objects to each other.
• 02:15 Here's another example.
• 02:16 I have four images that I want to align
• 02:19 with each other as well as to the center of the slide.
• 02:21 First, let's align them to each other.
• 02:24 Because they are the same size, this should be pretty straight forward.
• 02:28 Now the images are aligned with each other,
• 02:30 let's center them with the slide horizontally.
• 02:33 To do this, we will select all four images at the same time and
• 02:37 acting as a single object at least temporarily, we'll move them on
• 02:41 the slide until they're snapped into place center to the slide horizontally.
• 02:46 Next, lets add a text box underneath the first image, and
• 02:49 align that to the center of the image above.
• 02:53 By now, you should start to understand how the alignment guides work.
• 02:57 Before we finish, let me share with you two more tricks I use
• 03:00 often when working with alignment guides.
• 03:03 The first allows you to change the color of the guides.
• 03:05 Yellow is okay but I prefer something that stands out a little bit more like red.
• 03:10 To change the color of your alignment guide, let's go to Keynote and
• 03:14 preferences.
• 03:16 From here, we can click on the rulers button.
• 03:19 We can change the color of the alignment guides by clicking on the yellow block
• 03:23 next to the alignment guides like this.
• 03:26 There maybe other options related to alignment guides that you want to review
• 03:29 while you're in this window.
• 03:31 In some cases, you may want to add your own custom guide location.
• 03:36 For example, we may want to add a custom guide near the bottom of our slide
• 03:40 that we plan on snapping several objects to a later time.
• 03:44 To create our own guide we first need to view our ruler.
• 03:48 We can do this by going to view and show rulers.
• 03:52 Next we simply place our cursor in our top ruler
• 03:55 then drag down to the location of the new alignment guide.
• 03:59 This will create a vertical alignment guide.
• 04:02 To create a horizontal guide we do the same thing but
• 04:05 we'd use the left ruler to begin the process.
• 04:09 These custom guides can be adjusted or deleted at anytime.
• 04:12 To adjust the guide simply click and drag the guide to another location.
• 04:17 To remove a guide, drag it all the way to the top or
• 04:20 to the left of the canvass and then it will disappear.
• 04:24 These custom guides are not system-wide, application-wide, or even file-wide.
• 04:29 When we add a custom guide, it only applies to that slide.
• 04:33 If we want to use the same guide on another slide,
• 04:36 we would either apply that guide to a master slide by clicking on view,
• 04:40 edit master slides, or copy and paste the slide with the custom guide.
• 04:46 This will create a duplicate of the slide that we can now work with.
• 04:50 There's a lot of power in using alignment guides.
• 04:52 And now that you know how to use them, the power is in your hands.
• 04:55 Happy aligning.

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