Working with Guides in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows

Let's start with the basics: what are guides? Picture a tailor's cutting table, marked with faint chalk lines that keep every cut straight and every seam aligned. Guides work the same way on a PowerPoint slide, a personal grid you build yourself, one line at a time. Every guide can be moved, added, or deleted, entirely on your terms, nothing is fixed in place unless you decide it should be.

Here's the part that does the real work: guides come with snapping built in, permanently switched on, no settings to hunt down. Once guides are visible on the slide, any object that wanders close enough simply clicks into place, like a magnet finding metal. You don't have to aim carefully or nudge pixel by pixel, the guide does that job for you.

Alongside rulers and gridlines, guides form a trio built for precision, each one measuring, marking, or aligning in its own way. This page shows you how to put guides to work using the techniques that follow.

However, before you proceed to that task, it would be good to make sure that you are aware of these concepts:

• You can add more guides using a drag-to-spawn approach.
• You can also add, recolor, and remove guides. Explore our Guide Options in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows tutorial to learn more.
• Guides can also be added hierarchically to Slide Masters, Slide Layouts, and slides.

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

1. Launch PowerPoint, and make sure that the guides are visible. If they are not visible, you can use the Alt+F9 key 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 (any shape) on your slide. In this example, we placed a rectangle with a picture fill, as shown in Figure 2, below.
3. 
   Figure 2: Rectangle with a picture fill on slide 1
3. On the second slide, we placed another rectangle that does not have the same width and height dimensions as the rectangle on our first slide, as shown in Figure 3, below. This rectangle again has a picture fill, and the guide helped us anchor the bottom-left position of this rectangle to exactly match the bottom-left position of the rectangle in the previous slide. Compare Figures 2 and 3.
4. 
   Figure 3: Rectangle shape 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 when we moved these shapes fairly close to the guides where we needed to position them, they just snapped!
5. Save your presentation often.