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Once you have the gridlines visible on your slide in PowerPoint 2010, you can use them to easily position and snap slide objects uniformly on a single slide, or even across successive slides using the Snap to Grid option. To access the Snap to Grid option, and to make changes to the way it works, follow these steps:

1. Open a presentation in PowerPoint 2010 and make the gridlines visible. Figure 1 shows the gridlines visible on a PowerPoint slide.
   
   
   Figure 1: Gridlines visible on slide in PowerPoint
   
   
   Tip: Click the Shift + F9 shortcut key to toggle the visibility of gridlines in PowerPoint 2010.
   
   
   
2. Right-click on an empty area of the slide to bring up the context menu that you see in Figure 2. Select the Grid and Guides option from this menu.
   
   
   Figure 2: Grid and Guides option within context menu
   
   Alternatively, choose the Home tab in the Ribbon, locate the Drawing group and click Arrange button. From the resultant menu, choose Align | Grid Settings (see Figure 3).
   
   
   Figure 3: Grid Settings option
   
   
3. Either of these options summon the Grid and Guides dialog box, as shown in Figure 4.
   
   
   Figure 4: Grid and Guides dialog box
   
   This dialog box includes options for working with both the grid and guides -- options pertaining to the grid settings and slide object snapping are explained below:
   
   
   1. Snap objects to grid: This option snaps objects to the gridlines as soon as they are moved fairly close to them. You can also turn on this option even without accessing the Grids and Guides dialog box by using the (Ctrl + Shift + F9) shortcut key.
      
      You will learn more about snapping objects to the grid in a subsequent tutorial.
      
      
   2. Snap objects to other objects: To position slide objects to any nearby slide objects, turn on this option.
      
      
   3. Spacing: Under the Grid settings section, click the Spacing option to get a drop-down list (see Figure 5), and choose any of the grid spacing values available.
      
      
      Figure 5: Spacing drop-down list
      
      
   4. Display grid on screen: Select or clear the Display grid on screen check box to show / hide the gridlines on the slide. You can also turn on this option even without accessing the Grids and Guides dialog box by using the Shift + F9 shortcut key.
      
       If you want these settings to be the default settings for all of presentations you create, click the Set as Default button (refer to Figure 4 above).
4. When done, click the OK button to apply the changes. Do remember that any changes you make in this dialog box are relevant to the active presentation.
   
   
5. Save your presentation.
   

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