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Like rulers and gridlines, guides in PowerPoint allow you to position and snap your slide objects in place. When you enable guides using the steps illustrated on this page, you see just two guides by default. These guides are two dotted lines, one horizontal and the other vertical. They span to intersect at the very center of the slide, as shown in Figure 1.


Figure 1: Guides on the PowerPoint slide

By default these guides may not be visible at all on your slides. Making them visible though can help while working with positioning any of your slide objects. Also if you need to position certain objects at the same position on successive slides, guides can be an amazing help! In successive tutorials, we will explore techniques that help you working with guides, or even creating new guides. In this tutorial, you will learn how to get started with guides by showing or hiding them in PowerPoint 2010:

1. Launch PowerPoint 2010. Typically, the program opens a new presentation with a blank slide as shown in Figure 2 below. As you can see, there are no guides visible by default.
   
   
   Figure 2: Default PowerPoint interface with no guides visible
   
   
2. To make the guides visible, select the View tab of the Ribbon, locate the Show group, and enable the Guides check-box that has been highlighted in red in Figure 3.
   
   
   Figure 3: Enable the Guides check-box in the View tab of the Ribbon
   
   
3. Enabling the Guides option will result in a check mark to indicate that the guides have been turned on (see Figure 4). Conversely, you can also uncheck this same option to turn off the guides.
   
   
   Figure 4: Guides check box selected
   
   
   Tip: To turn on the visibility of the guides, you can use the keyboard shortcut Alt + F9. Use the same shortcut key to toggle it away.
   
   
4. Now you will see guides displayed on the slide as shown in Figure 5.
   
   
   Figure 5: Guides are now visible on the PowerPoint slide
   

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