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In this series of tutorials about formatting shape outlines in PowerPoint 2010, you have already seen how to apply weight, dash styles, arrowheads, and also gradients to the shape outlines. Now let us learn how to remove any outline from the shape so that your shape has only fill without any outline. Whenever you insert a new shape into a PowerPoint slide, you can see that it is filled with a solid color and has an outline by default (this may differ depending on the Theme applied to your presentation). But if you want you can remove the fill of the shape as well as the outline.

In this tutorial, I'll show you how you can remove the outline from a shape in PowerPoint 2010:

1. Select the shape that you want to remove the outline for. Alternatively, if you just want to follow this tutorial step-by-step, launch PowerPoint. Most of the time, PowerPoint will open with a new slide in a presentation -- PowerPoint 2010 users can change the slide layout to Blank by selecting Home tab | Layout | Blank.
   
   
2. Within the Home or Insert tab of the Ribbon, click the Shapes button to view the Shapes gallery that you can see in Figure 1. Select any closed shape, and then either drag and draw, or click once on the blank slide to place an instance of the shape. I have used a Rectangle shape and changed the fill color so that you can see the difference after outline is removed (see later in Figure 2).
   
   
   Don't know what a closed shape means? Or what do we mean by an open shape? Look at the first figure in our Formatting Shape Outlines in PowerPoint 2010 tutorial to understand this better.
   
   
   Figure 1: Shapes gallery
   
   
3. Select the shape so that the Ribbon area now shows the Drawing Tools Format tab, as shown in Figure 2. Activate this Ribbon tab by clicking on it.
   
   
   Figure 2: Drawing Tools Format tab of the Ribbon
   
   
   Note: The Drawing Tools Format tab is a contextual tab. These tabs are special tabs in the Ribbon that are not visible all the time -- they only make an appearance when you are working with a particular slide object which can be edited using special options.
   
   
4. From the Drawing Tools Format tab, locate the Shape Styles group, then click the Shape Outline button to access the Shape Outline drop-down gallery that you can see in Figure 3. In this gallery choose the No Outline option.
   
   
   Figure 3: No Outline option within Shape Outline galley
   
   
5. In Figure 4 below, you can see the previously selected Rectangle shape after removing it's outline.
   
   
   Figure 4: Shape with no outline
   
   
6. Remember to save your presentation often.
   
   
   Tip: Never use the No Outline (explained on this page) and No Fill options for the same shape -- that is as good as making the shape invisible!.
   
   

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