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Fills for Shapes in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac

Author: Geetesh Bajaj

Product/Version: Microsoft PowerPoint 2011
OS: Mac OS X

Date Created: July 22nd 2011
Last Updated: August 2nd 2011

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Excerpt/Capsule: Learn about different fill types for shapes in PowerPoint 2011.

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Whenever a shape is inserted within a PowerPoint 2011 slide, you will discover that it has a blueish white gradient fill (or some other fill). You may insert hundreds of shapes and they all have this same default fill, influenced by the Theme applied to your presentation. You may wonder how did any Theme get applied to your presentation? You must know that all new presentations have a simple Theme applied to them -- this Theme decides what the color or style of new shapes will be. Thus, all new shapes that you insert will have the same fill -- look at Figure 1 and you will see that the three shapes inserted in the slide ended up with the same blueish white gradient fill.

Figure 1: All new shapes inserted in PowerPoint 2011 will have a blue gradient fill by default

If you want, you can change the fill of any shape. You can change it to a solid color fill or even change the fill type altogether to a pattern, texture, or picture, as shown in Figure 2. In this series of tutorials, we will show you how you can do this in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

Figure 2: Various fill types applied to shapes

The Shape Fill tutorials included in this series for the users of PowerPoint 2011 are:

1. Add Solid Fills to Shapes
2. Add Gradient Fills to Shapes
3. Add Picture Fills to Shapes
4. Add Texture Fills to Shapes
5. Add Pattern Fills to Shapes
6. Add Slide Background Fills to Shapes
7. No Fill

Most of the above tutorials will show you links that you can click on when these pages have been released. Also most of these upcoming tutorials will include online presentations that show you samples of the fill attributes