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 exactly 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 can get PowerPoint to do it for me!
The first thing you need to do is select the objects.
To select all of them at once, just hold Shift on your keyboard while you click.
Next, we'll go the Format tab and click the Align command.
You 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 their 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 side we could
go back to the Align command and select Align to Slide.
And now if I click 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 will 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 have the same amount of space between one another.
Now that I have these objects arranged to the way I want,
I'm going to group them so that they always stay together.
Just make sure you have each of your objects selected, then click the Group command...
and choose Group.
Now we had a single grouped object that we can move and resize anyway we want
See how each shape 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 one looks pretty good.
And I'll just select a different shape style to make it look the way I want.
Hmm...this looks OK
but what I'd really like is to have the arrow shape behind all the pictures.
Right now it's overlapping and we really can't see them very well.
This can happen any time you have multiple objects, depending on the order they're in.
To change the order of an object, make sure its 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, this 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.
OK, 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 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 am going to group these pictures with the area shape so I can
resize them and move them exactly where I want without changing any of this
other formatting I've done.
OK! 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.