Types of Shapes
Shapes play a significant role within any slides you create for your PowerPoint presentation. In more ways that you may want to count, shapes are like the building blocks of almost anything you do on your PowerPoint slides -- PowerPoint 2013 provides hundreds of shapes efficiently categorized into 9 types.

---

Insert Shapes
Shapes are the building blocks of whatever you create in PowerPoint -- in fact even a text box that you add to your slide is essentially a shape that has a no fill. Once you get proficient with shapes, you can do so much more -- for example, you can combine multiple shapes to create fancier shapes. However, you need to start with the very basics -- and there's so much to learn even at this foundation level. The first task you need to do is to insert a shape -- fortunately PowerPoint makes it easy to do this task. To insert a new shape on your PowerPoint slide, follow these steps.

---

Insert and/or Link Pictures
You know that pictures located in any of your folders can be inserted on a slide. However, have you wondered about the relation a picture on the slide has with the original picture located in your folder? Yet, there are options within PowerPoint that let you maintain the relation between the original picture and the inserted picture -- for example, if you make changes to your original picture, PowerPoint will update its copy on the slide!

What is AutoCorrect?
The AutoCorrect feature in PowerPoint fixes a number of common typos and spelling errors within your slides -- automatically as you type any text. AutoCorrect also lets you map specific keyboard sequences to a symbol, such as replacing two en dashes with an em dash the moment you hit the Enter key after the second en dash. The best feature within AutoCorrect is that it works so seamlessly that you may not even know that it is working behind the scenes. And this unawareness about AutoCorrect can ironically also cause some problems! You may for example not want the two en dashes to automatically change to an em dash -- in this tutorial you will learn how you can take advantage of AutoCorrect, and also how you can override its options as required.

---

AutoCorrect Options
The AutoCorrect feature in PowerPoint fixes a number of common typos and spelling errors within your slides -- automatically as you type any text. AutoCorrect also lets you map specific keyboard sequences to a symbol, such as replacing two en dashes with an em dash the moment you hit the Enter key after the second en dash. The best feature within AutoCorrect is that it works so seamlessly that you may not even know that it is working behind the scenes. And this unawareness about AutoCorrect can ironically also cause some problems! You may for example not want the two en dashes to automatically change to an em dash -- in this tutorial you will learn how you can take advantage of AutoCorrect, and also how you can override its options as required.

---

Creating and Editing AutoCorrect Entries
The AutoCorrect feature is dependent on a small list of words and phrases stored on your computer. This list contains two columns called Replace and With -- for example the Replace entry for teh will correspond to the With entry containing the word the. Although this list works for PowerPoint users, what you must know is that this AutoCorrect list is set globally across all Microsoft Office programs such as Word, Excel, Outlook, etc. If you add, edit, or delete entries within this AutoCorrect list, all changes will be reflected beyond PowerPoint.