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Once you place an AutoShape on a PowerPoint slide, you may format it by changing its fill or outline -- or you may add animation to it. Later if you realize that you used a wrong AutoShape -- maybe you used a star in place of a triangle, you may be tempted to delete the original AutoShape altogether and start from scratch by adding a new AutoShape, and change its fill and add animation to it. The good news is that you need not work so hard -- you can change any existing AutoShape to another using these steps:

1. Select the AutoShape which you want to change (see Figure 1).
   
   
   Figure 1: Selected Autoshape
   
   
2. Access the Drawing toolbar typically located at the bottom of PowerPoint interface and click the Draw button, as shown in the Figure 2.
   
   
   Figure 2: Access Draw from the Drawing toolbar
   
   
   Tip: If the Drawing toolbar is not visible, choose View | Toolbars | Drawing.
   
   
3. From the resultant menu, choose the Change AutoShape option (see Figure 3). This brings up the submenus for the various AutoShape categories -- choose the category you want and select the AutoShape you need to change to (refer to Figure 3 again).
   
   
   Figure 3: Choose AutoShape to change
   
   
4. This will change the existing AutoShape to the new variant you chose in the previous step (see Figure 4). Note that the new AutoShape has the same fill and outline attributes as the earlier AutoShape -- any other attributes such as hyperlinks or animation will also transfer to the new AutoShape.
   
   
   Figure 4: Changed AutoShape
   

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