While several of my other tips mention the use of the Align feature in PowerPoint, I’ve never covered it by itself. If you insert objects on a slide and want them to be aligned, you need to know about this feature — and many people don’t; they’re still using the arrow keys.
First insert the objects on your slide. Then decide how you want to align them. By their left sides? Along the tops?
Here’s a slide with buttons down the right side that badly need aligning.
badly aligned buttons
I want to align their right sides. Note that the result will align all the buttons with the rightmost button, which is the Editing button.
Select all the objects.Then choose Draw > Align or Distribute from the Drawing toolbar. Choose one of the options. I chose Align Right, but you can also choose Align Left or Center. For horizontal alignments, you can also choose Align Top, Middle, or Bottom.
For PowerPoint 2007, select the objects, click the Format tab, and choose the Align button in the Arrange group. Then choose one of the Align options.
If your objects aren’t evenly spaced from each other, do one more step. With the objects still selected (you need at least 3 for this process), choose Draw > Align or Distribute > Distribute Vertically (for this example) or Horizontally.
For PowerPoint 2007, click the Format tab, and choose the Align button in the Arrange group. Then choose one of the Distribute options.
perfect alignment and distribution of buttons
Do you know what rules PowerPoint uses to align objects?
For example, I have 12 objects which I wish to align in 4 equally distributed columns of 3.
If I align the top row to be evenly distributed, then select the three items that make up column 1, the top line object invariably moves. I think PPT is using an average position to which it aligns more than 2 objects. IN Illustrator, one can select the ‘key’ object in a group so that alignment is ‘to’ that object. I cannot see how to do this in PPT..