Fills for Shapes in PowerPoint 2016 for Mac

When you insert shapes on a PowerPoint slide, you will notice that all shapes you insert contain the same fill. Most of the time, the shapes may contain a solid color fill. Similarly, you may insert hundreds of shapes and they all have this same default fill. Have you ever wanted to change this fill to something else?

Before we explore changing fills, it is important to understand that the default fill you see for new, inserted shapes is influenced by the Theme applied to your presentation. All new presentations have a simple Theme applied to them, and this Theme decides the default color or style for the new shape. Thus, all new shapes that you insert will have the same fill. Look at Figure 1 where you can see that the three shapes inserted on a slide ended up with the same solid blue fill.

Figure 1: Shapes filled with default fill type

You can change the fill of any shape to a solid color fill, or even change the fill type altogether to a pattern, texture, or picture, as shown in Figure 2. In this series of tutorials, we will show you how you can do this in PowerPoint 2016 for Mac.

Figure 2: Various fill types applied to shapes

The Shape Fill tutorials included in this series work with shapes in PowerPoint 2016 for Mac. Click on any link to learn more:

1. Solid Fills
2. Picture Fills
3. Advanced Picture Fill Options
4. Gradient Fills
5. More Gradients
6. Gradient Stops
7. Textures Fills
8. Tiling Options
9. Pattern Fills
10. Slide Background Fill
11. No Fill
12. Transparency for Shape Fills

Click on the tutorial link of your choice to learn more about a particular shape fill type. Also, most of these tutorials include online presentations that show you samples of the fill attributes.