Goodwill Community Foundation creating
opportunities for a better life pictures
text boxes and shapes are all considered
objects in PowerPoint sometimes you may
need a little help arranging these
objects to get your slides to look the
way you want for example take a look at
the different pictures on this slide
right now they're placed kind of
randomly but I'd rather have them lined
up in a row of course I could try to do
this manually or I could get PowerPoint
to do it for me the first thing you'll
need to do is select the objects you
want to align to select them all at once
just hold shift on your keyboard while
you click
next we'll go to the format tab and
click the align command you'll have
several different options to choose from
ranging from vertical to horizontal
alignment you can also choose whether to
align the objects to the slide or to
each other which is the default setting
when you select multiple objects like
this this time I'm going to go with
align bottom
and now the objects are aligned with one
another along your bottom edge note that
they didn't move all the way to the
bottom of the slide they just moved
enough to be aligned with one another
now if we did want to align them with
the slide we could go back to the align
command and check align to slide
and now when we click say align middle
they move to the exact middle of the
slide
there's another thing I'd like to change
that can be done just as easily notice
how the shapes are lined up but they're
not quite evenly spaced to fix that
we'll need to distribute the objects
first we'll go back to the align command
and choose align selected objects that's
because we only want to put an equal
amount of space between each picture we
don't want to spread them out equally
across the whole slide
next we'll choose distribute
horizontally
and there we go now the pictures
the same amount of space between one
another all right now that I have these
objects arranged the way I want I'm
going to group them so they always stay
together just make sure you have each of
your objects selected then click the
group command and choose group
now we have a single grouped object that
we can move and resize any way we want
see how each object in the group does
the same thing
and if you ever want to ungroup your
objects just select group ungroup
you know I think I'd also like to add a
new shape to this slide so I'll go to
the insert tab and click the shapes
command
this area looks pretty good
and I'll just select a different shape
to make it look the way I want
hmm this looks okay but what I'd really
like is to have the arrow shape behind
all of the pictures right now it's
overlapping and we really can't see them
very well this can happen anytime you
have multiple objects depending on the
order they're in to change the order of
an object make sure it's selected then
go to the format tab you have two
commands to choose from bring forward or
send backward depending on what you need
now you may need to experiment with
these options to find what you're
looking for for example if I click send
backward the shape moves back only one
level basically behind one of the
pictures but the others are still
covered up by the arrow whenever you're
working with multiple objects like this
it can be helpful to turn on the
selection pane from here you can easily
see the order of all the objects on this
slide and even change their order within
the pane if you prefer okay so it looks
like the arrow shape is still above the
other two pictures so I'm going to click
the drop down arrow here and choose send
to back and that takes care of it if we
look at the selection pane we can see
that the shape was moved to the very
bottom which is why it appears behind
the pictures on the slide
finally I'm going to group these
pictures with the arrow shape so I can
resize them and move them exactly where
I want without changing any of this
other formatting I've done
okay everything is perfectly aligned and
arranged in the right order I'm really
happy with the way this slide looks the
more you practice using these tools on
your own the better you'll be at working
with objects in all kinds of situations
you