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Drawing shapes in PowerPoint is drop-dead easy with the vast repertoire of readymade shapes available in PowerPoint 2010. You can easily insert these shapes with a click or two, but some tricks can help you take these shapes further -- in this tutorial, I'll show you how you can draw a perfect circle.

Follow these steps to explore how:

1. Launch PowerPoint 2010. Most of the time, PowerPoint will open with a new slide in a presentation -- PowerPoint 2010 users can change the slide layout to Blank by selecting Home tab | Layout | Blank.
   
   
2. Within the Home or Insert tab of the Ribbon, click the Shapes button to view the Shapes gallery that you can see in Figure 1. Select the Oval shape since that's what we will use to draw a circle.
   
   
   Figure 1: Oval shape selected
   
   
3. Use any of these two options to place a perfect circle shape on your slide:
   
   
• Click anywhere on the slide to add the Oval shape in a predefined size (typically 1 inch x 1 inch), as shown in Figure 2.
  For resizing, hold down the Shift key while dragging any of the four corner handles to retain the circle proportion (preventing the circle from becoming an oval).
  
  
  Figure 2: Circle shape placed on the slide
  
  
• Alternatively, click on the slide. Don't let go off the mouse yet -- instead hold the Shift key while dragging to constrain the height and width proportions, as shown in Figure 3. Optionally, you can hold the Ctrl key (in addition to the Shift key) to draw a circle from the center.
  
  
  Figure 3: Drawing a circle while holding the Shift key
4. Save your presentation.
   

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