Do your slides look tidy and organized or are your text boxes all over the place with no cohesive order? If you want to put some order into your slides, check these few quick tips out. We’ll show you how to use the grid lines in PowerPoint to make it easier for you to align text boxes and other objects properly.
There are just 3 checkboxes you need to enable in your PowerPoint toolbar to get all the alignment tools you need. That way, you will have visual measurements that will help you snap objects and text boxes exactly where they need to be, instead of doing it manually.
Go to your View tab to find the alignment settings.
Guides
Enabling your guides will split your slides 50/50 on a vertical and horizontal level. This way you can have a visual orientation where the center of the slide is and how you can distribute your content according to that.
You can also move those guides wherever you need them. Here’s a use case for example.
This is an easy way to design with consistency so that multiple slides have the same alignment for your text boxes. The precision that the guides give you helps you have a good look at how you can utilize the entire slide properly.
Gridlines
The gridlines split your entire slide into square boxes you can use to easily visualize how much space you’d like your objects to take up. They are a visual reference that helps you align different objects in a balanced way.
You can customize their spacing and other settings by simply right-clicking on the slide and clicking on Grid and Guides.
Enable or disable the snapping to the grid from the checkbox at the top. This means that when you move a text box or any other object near the gridline it will snap to it automatically so you don’t need to fine-tune it manually.
You can also adjust the gridline spacing based on what you need for your presentation project.
Ruler
The Ruler in PowerPoint shows you horizontal and vertical measurements on the right and top sides of your slide. You can use them by adding new guidelines and aligning them based on the ruler measurements you prefer.
Right-click and hover on the Grid and Guides button to reveal the dropdown where you can add more vertical and horizontal guides you can adjust using the ruler.
When you have all of these enabled, configured, and you know how to use them right, you will instantly start designing much better slides. You will be able to align and organize your slides much better and achieve design consistency much easier.
Summing Up
You’re now one step closer to becoming a better presentation designer. Let us know if this helped you organize your content and build slides faster. The more you start using the alignment options in PowerPoint, the easier it will be for you to finish your projects faster so you can present slides that are easy on the eye and help your audience follow along.
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