Align and Distribute Shapes

Quick reference

• 00:05 It’s so important when you design a presentation that the elements on your slide are aligned and balanced and don’t look like a bunch of cows
• 00:11 that have walked in from the paddock to eat the grass all over your slides. Now these four objects that I have on the slide, the shapes, I
• 00:18 select all of them with a marquee with the mouse, the format tab becomes available and here is the align drop down item; notice that
• 00:26 align selected objects is selected. Now I would suggest if I go align left, because the boundary point is the shapes themselves or the reference
• 00:36 point, they will all move over level with number 1 and that’s exactly what happens. CTRL Z undoes, so align right, they should all move over
• 00:46 toward number 4, exactly because that becomes the reference point. Align top, they should all move up level with number 1, very
• 00:54 good. Align bottom, works as well, so we can that the shapes themselves become the external reference point. If we align center,
• 01:05 PowerPoint does a calculation between the outer edges on the left and on the right, finds the mean or the median point, and places the
• 01:13 objects there, CTRL Z, align middle, and the same happens. So that’s really cool. The other option that we have is to actually align to slide,
• 01:23 so now the slide boundary becomes the reference point, so align left, they all move to the edge of the slide, align right, they move to the
• 01:32 right edge of the slide, align top, align bottom and you can see where this is going, align center, perfectly aligns to the center, and aligned
• 01:45 middle, very good. Ok, so it’s very easy to align shapes, you can align them to the shape boundaries themselves or to the slide. Let’s
• 01:54 have a look at distribute. First of all, we’re going to distribute according to selected objects. So I go distribute horizontally, and it’s a little bit hard
• 02:06 to see because they’re out of vertical alignment so let’s undo, lets align selected objects, lets align middle, now let’s distribute horizontally,
• 02:20 and we can see now that they are evenly spaced, number 1, number 4 didn’t move because they are the outside anchor points. If
• 02:27 we go distribute vertically, nothing will happen because there is no upper or lower shape from which to take a reference point. So let’s align to
• 02:37 slide, distribute horizontally, they are now all evenly spaced across the slide. Notice even the gap between shape number 1 and number 2 is
• 02:48 the same gap between the edge of the slide and number 1 and the edge of the slide and number 4. So what happens if we distribute those
• 02:57 vertically with the reference point being the slide? There they are; they’ve all moved fairly evenly but it’s interesting that we have number
• 03:06 1, number 2, go up to number 3 and down to number 4. And part of the reason for that is the way they were originally placed on the slide. So
• 03:15 what I would do there is grab number 1 and move it up, make sure number 3 is lower, make sure number 4 is lower so that they are in some
• 03:24 form of sequence. Format, the align button, distribute horizontally, distribute vertically and there they are in the correct order, so that’s a
• 03:34 little trick when it doesn’t work exactly the way you think it might. Right click on these objects, group, and now they are all part of the one
• 03:44 group. I can shrink them down and rotate them, and there we are, we have number 1, 2, 3 and 4, they’re very evenly spaced and distributed
• 03:54 across the slide. So that’s well worth understanding and knowing, I’ll just ungroup those again, because that brings up our align
• 04:03 button so remember that you can align or you can distribute, but you can also align the selected objects so that they themselves are
• 04:11 the reference point, versus aligning to the slide, where the shapes take their reference point off the slide. So everything will be balanced and
• 04:20 aligned and distributed and it won’t look like the cows have walked in over your presentation.

Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.