Add Pattern Fills to Shapes in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows
Add pattern fills to shapes in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.
Author:Geetesh Bajaj
Product/Version: PowerPoint 2010 for Windows
OS: Microsoft Windows XP / Vista / 7 / 8
In this series on fills for shapes, we have already explored
solid fills,
gradient fills,
picture fills, and
texture fills for shapes in
PowerPoint 2010. Now we show you how you can use the Pattern fill option. If you are a
PowerPoint old-timer, you will remember that Microsoft removed this option in PowerPoint 2007 although it existed in PowerPoint 2003 and previous
versions. With PowerPoint 2010, they bring back this option but they have buried it in a dialog box rather than including it within the Shape Fill
gallery. In this tutorial, we'll show you how you can access this fill option, but first, let us talk about what patterns are.
Patterns in PowerPoint are two-color designs comprising lines, dots, dashes and checks. PowerPoint includes 48 patterns such patterns with names
like plaid, weaves, shingle and zig zag. If you want to see a sample presentation showing pattern fills in PowerPoint, scroll down to the bottom of
this page.
Follow these steps to change or apply a pattern fill to a shape:
Select the shape(s) that you want to fill with a pattern.
Alternatively, if you just want to follow this tutorial step-by-step, launch PowerPoint. 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.
Within the Home or Insert tab of the
Ribbon, choose the Shapes button to view the
Shapes gallery that you can see in Figure 1. Select any shape, and then either drag and draw, or click once on the
blank slide to place an instance of the shape (we used a heart shape as
you can see later in Figure 2).
Figure 1: Shapes gallery
Right click the shape, and from the context menu that appears, choose the Format Shape option as shown in
Figure 2.
Figure 2: Fomat Shape option selected in the context menu
This opens the Format Shape dialog box. Make sure that the Fill tab is selected, then click the radio button
for Pattern fill (refer to Figure 3 below). Now you can see a pattern gallery on the lower half of the
Format Shape dialog box shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Format Shape dialog box with pattern gallery
Choose any of the pattern styles. Figure 3 above shows that we selected the pattern named Sphere. You can select any pattern all
the way from 5% to Solid diamonds depending on your need.
Whichever pattern you choose, you can then change the foreground and background colors for the pattern using the Foreground Color
and Background Color buttons that you can see in Figure 3 above. When you click any of these buttons you can see
the drop-down Colors gallery as shown in Figure 4 below.
Figure 4: Colors gallery for Foreground and Background colors
This gallery will work in the same way as it does for
solid fills (this link takes you to one of our
previous tutorials). If you don't want to change the foreground and background colors, just accept the default color values that PowerPoint uses.
Once the pattern is selected and colors are changed, click the Close button in the Format Shape dialog box (see
Figure 3) to apply the pattern to the selected shape(s). In Figure 5 below, you can see the previously selected
heart shape with an added pattern fill.
Figure 5: Shape with pattern fill
Remember to save your presentation often.
Sample Presentation of Pattern Fill in Shape:
Click below to view this presentation on SlideShare
All these gears are native PowerPoint shapes. You can recolor them, add effects, and do more, all inside PowerPoint. Results which would have taken
hours to achieve now take less than a minute! Have fun using the gear graphics, and make your audience take notice! All these gears can be rotated and
resized, as required. Since they are essentially pictures, all types of edits that you can do with pictures work with them too!
