Adding and Manipulating Shapes

Quick reference

• 00:03 Sooner or later in PowerPoint you’re going to need to add shapes to slides and that’s what this video is all about. Shapes is as easy as
• 00:10 finding the insert tab on the ribbon, this looks like a button but it’s actually a drop down menu that gives us a whole bunch of shapes in various
• 00:17 groups. I go for rectangle which is called a rounded rectangle, click and release and there is our shape on the slide. Now while the shape
• 00:27 is selected the format tab is available for the drawing tools, and here on the insert shapes group is another menu and I figure get your
• 00:36 shapes from wherever you can find them. An oval, click, drag, release and there it is, move that down the bottom, and there’s also on
• 00:44 available on the home tab so I’m going to grab a little triangle, drop and release and there it is, three shapes on the slide. Adding text to these
• 00:53 shapes is as easy as selecting and typing, so start, middle, and we’ll call this one, end. Now it’s time to actually connect these with
• 01:04 connector lines so insert, the shapes drop down box, a curved arrow connector, notice a I move my mouse over the shapes I get these little blue
• 01:12 dots which are connector points, so when I click the connector will snap to that, the little green dot says it’s connected, the white square says
• 01:22 it’s not, so click, drag to a connection point, and it will snap the little yellow icon is about moving the centre point. So let’s grab another one from
• 01:33 here, hover over the shape, find a blue dot, click, holding the mouse, drag, find another point, release, and there is it, very cool, very simple
• 01:44 and the great thing about these connectors is, as you move your shapes around, whether by the mouse or the arrow key, they update
• 01:51 because they stay connected, very cool. Let’s do some formatting, click, shape styles on the format tab, select, select this one. I hit F4 on
• 01:59 the keyboard which is the redo last command instruction, which works most times and saves time. Click the connector, let’s take this one,
• 02:10 and that one, let’s take this one, and there is almost a little bit of a flowchart. We can align those shapes and do all kinds of things. Very
• 02:19 cool. One last item is that if we actually click on one of these connectors, we can reroute the connectors which is basically about moving
• 02:27 them to a new location. I prefer to do that with a mouse, but also, right click, connector type, we can change to a similar one, so an elbow
• 02:36 connector and there we have our elbow connectors. So inserting shapes is very easy, use the insert menu or the home tab, find the
• 02:45 drop down area of the groups of shapes, connectors will click to snapping points, the green dots show you that they’re connected
• 02:52 indeed, you can format them and you can right click on them and get a couple of menu items, so well worth your time to learn to save time.

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