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Sometimes you need to draw multiple shapes of the same type on a slide, maybe a hundred smiley faces on one slide, or even a hundred stars on a dark blue slide, as you can see in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1: Stars on a dark blue slide

Yes, you can do that in PowerPoint by duplicating existing shapes but when did you see a night sky where each star was the exact same size? So that leaves out the Ctrl+dragging and Ctrl+D duplicating tricks, since every shape that's exactly the same in size as the other certainly does not look organic. Yes, you are back to inserting single shapes on the slide! Essentially, you select a shape from the Shapes gallery, and then draw your shape -- then revisit the Shapes gallery again to select that same shape again, and redraw another instance. Yes, that means a hundred trips to the Shapes gallery, and drawing on the slide as many times -- there has to be an easier way. Indeed there is an option to make things simpler -- and it is called the Lock Drawing Mode option. To see how this option makes the task of drawing organic looking shapes a lot easier and faster, follow these steps:

1. Access the Shapes gallery from the Home or Insert tabs of the Ribbon -- choose the shape type you want to draw, as shown in Figure 2.
   
   
   Figure 2: Select the shape
   
   
2. Now don't click on the shape you want yet -- rather, right click the shape and choose the Lock Drawing Mode option from the resultant menu (see Figure 3). This will make the selected shape sticky, as in you won't have to go back to the Shapes gallery again once you're done drawing a shape.
   
   
   Figure 3: Lock Drawing Mode option
   
   
3. Start drawing the shape on the slide as many times you want. Figure 4 shows the selected Smiley Face shape has been drawn on the slide multiple times in different sizes.
   
   
   
   Tip: Hold the Shift key to draw the shape proportionately.
   
   
   Figure 4: Draw shape
   
   
4. Once you are done with drawing the number of shapes you want, you can disable the Lock Drawing Mode option by pressing the Esc key.

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