Working with Guides in PowerPoint 2016 for Mac

To begin, let's start with the basics: what are guides in PowerPoint? Consider guides as individual lines from a grid on your slide that you create. Every single guide can be moved, added, or deleted. Guides also have snap options that are always on. Once the guides are made visible on the slide, all objects that venture close enough to them just snap. Along with rulers, guides help you position your slide objects with more precision, and you can make them work for you using techniques explained on this page.

Let’s first make sure that you are aware of these concepts:

• You can add more guides using a drag-to-spawn approach.
• You can also add and remove guides through the options that can be accessed by right-clicking (or Ctrl+clicking) the guide.
• Guides can also be added hierarchially to the Slide Masters, Slide Layouts, and Slides.

Now, let us explore how you can work effectively with guides in PowerPoint 2016 for Mac:

1. Launch PowerPoint, and make sure that the guides are visible. If they are not to be seen, you can use the ⌘+Option+Ctrl+G keyboard shortcut to turn them on (and toggle them off). Other than the two default guides, create two more new guides: a new vertical guide on the left area of the slide and another new horizontal guide on the bottom area of the slide, as shown in Figure 1, below.
2. 
   Figure 1: Multiple guides on a slide
3. 

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2. Place a shape or a picture on your slide. We inserted a picture, as shown in Figure 2, below.
3. 
   Figure 2: Picture on the slide
3. On the next slide, we placed another picture that does not have the same width and height dimensions as the picture on our first slide, as shown in Figure 3, below. The guide helped us anchor the bottom left position of this picture to exactly match the bottom left position of the rectangle in the previous slide. Compare Figures 2 and 3.
4. 
   Figure 3: Picture with different width and height on slide 2
4. We were able to position the bottom left of both rectangles on successive slides identically because we moved these shapes close to the guides. As soon as they were fairly close to the guides where we needed to position them, they just snapped!
5. Save your presentation often.