One way of aligning shapes or pictures on slides is to make use of PowerPoint’s Guide feature. A guide is a nonprinting, nonprojecting line (either vertical or horizontal) that is visible only when the slide show is in edit mode and only if you turn the guide feature on (it is off by default). This line acts like a magnet if you move a shape within its vicinity, snapping the shape to itself. Such functionality comes in very handy, especially when you have shapes on multiple slides and want each shape to be in exactly the same place on each slide.

Turn on the guide feature by double-clicking a shape or picture on the slide pane to display the Drawing Tools Format tab or Picture Tools Format tab and clicking the Align button, clicking the Grid Settings option at the bottom of the menu (Figure 1) to display the Grid and Guides dialog box, and then selecting the Display drawing guides on screen check box (Figure 2). A faster way of accessing this dialog box, by the way, is to simply right-click the slide pane (or the blue area outside the slide pane) and click Grid and Guides.

When you click OK, a horizontal guide and a vertical guide initially appear at the center of the slide pane, like a crosshair. Experiment with moving shapes next to these guides.
The positioning of a guide can be changed by resting the pointer exactly over it, and then clicking and dragging it sideways (vertical guide) or up and down (horizontal guide). Note that you must click EXACTLY on the guide to select and drag it (Figure 3).

We recommend getting in the habit of clicking and dragging the guide in the blue area outside the slide pane. That way, if you accidentally miss the guide during the initial click (quite common), you won’t inadvertently drag slide content to a different location during the subsequent drag operation. If you do accidentally drag slide content, press Ctrl Z to undo the action and try again.

You can also create up to seven additional guides (both vertical and horizontal) by holding down the Ctrl key while clicking and dragging the guides. Keep in mind that guide positioning and configuration are specific to individual slide shows and are saved along with the show. If you open a different slide show, guides will display in their default positions, unless you previously changed them and saved the show.

As a point of interest, an alternative strategy to use when you want similar objects to appear in exactly the same position across multiple slides in a show is to create and assign a layout (see PowerPoint help files for details).

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