Align Shapes to the Center of the Slide in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac
Author: Geetesh Bajaj
Product/Version: Microsoft PowerPoint 2011
OS: Mac OS X
Date Created: November 30th 2011
Last Updated: November 30th 2011
Excerpt/Capsule: Learn how align a shape to the center of a slide in PowerPoint 2011.
You have learned to align shapes in PowerPoint 2011 -- for alignment to work at all you need to have multiple shapes or other slide objects selected so that they can align to each other. However, you may want to align just one shape (or even a group of shapes) to the exact center of the slide. Fortunately, that is as easy to achieve as well:
- Select the
shape (or a group of shapes) placed on the slide, as shown in Figure
1.
Figure 1: Shape selected on the PowerPoint slide
- Access the Home tab of the Ribbon, and click the Arrange button.
In the resultant gallery, click the Align or Distribute option to bring up the Align or Distribute sub-gallery (see Figure 2). Make sure that the Align to Slide option is selected -- selection is indicated by a check mark (highlighted in red in Figure 2).
Figure 2: Align to Slide option selected in the Align or Distribute sub-gallery
- With the Align to Slide option selected, click both the Align Center and the Align Middle options one after the other.
- This will position the shape to the exact center of the slide,
as shown in Figure
3.
Figure 3: Selected shape aligned to the center of the slide
- Save your presentation often.
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Tip: If you need to center several shapes on a slide without altering their distance from each other just select all the shapes and group them. Then select the group, and follow the steps explained on this page. Once you have centered them, you can ungroup them. There is one caveat to this solution though -- if your individual slide objects were animated before you grouped them, you would lose their animation characteristics by grouping and ungrouping them later.