Drawing a Perfect Square in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac
Author: Geetesh Bajaj
Product/Version: PowerPoint 2011
OS: Mac OS X
Date Created: June 22nd 2011
Last Updated: June 22nd 2011
Excerpt/Capsule: Learn how to draw a perfect square in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.
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Drawing shapes in PowerPoint is drop-dead easy with the vast repertoire of readymade shapes available in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac. 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 square:
- Launch PowerPoint 2011 -- typically, this brings up the PowerPoint Presentation Gallery -- here you can just click the Cancel button to create a blank, new presentation containing one slide.
On the other hand, if you are not presented with the PowerPoint Presentation Gallery, you will still end up with a blank, new presentation containing one slide -- PowerPoint 2011 users can next change
the slide layout to Blank.
- Within the Home tab of the Ribbon,
locate the Insert group. Within this group, click
the Shape button
to view the Shape gallery that you can see in Figure
1.
Select the Rectangles sub-gallery and select the Rectangle
shape since that's what we will use to draw a square.
Figure 1: Rectangle shape selected
- Use any of these two options to place a perfect rectangle shape on
your slide:
- Click anywhere on the slide to add the Rectangle 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 square proportion.
Figure 2: Rectangle shape placed on the slide as a perfect square
- Alternatively, click on the slide. Don't let go off the mouse
yet -- instead, hold down the Shift key while dragging to constrain
the height and width proportions, as shown in Figure
3. Optionally, you can hold the Alt (Option) key (in addition
to the Shift key) to draw a square from the center.
Figure 3: Drawing a square holding the Shift key - Save your presentation.