Guides in PowerPoint 365 for Windows

Like Gridlines, Guides help you position and align slide objects with greater precision. In fact, many professional presentation designers consider Guides to be indispensable. Designing a slide without them can feel a bit like trying to hang a picture frame on a wall without first checking whether it is level—you might get close, but achieving perfect alignment becomes much harder.

Think of Guides as invisible construction lines used by architects when drafting a building. They are not part of the finished structure, but they help ensure that everything is placed exactly where it should be. Similarly, Guides do not appear in Slide Show view or when you print your presentation, but they play an important role behind the scenes while you design.

When you enable Guides for the first time in PowerPoint, you will see two dotted lines appear on the slide. One guide runs horizontally and the other vertically. Together, they intersect precisely at the center of the slide, as shown in Figure 1, below. These default Guides effectively divide the slide into four equal sections, providing an immediate reference point for placing and aligning content.

Figure 1: Guides on a PowerPoint slide

By default, guides may not be visible on your slides. Making them visible though, can help while working with positioning and aligning any of your slide objects. Also, if you need to position certain objects at the same position on successive slides, guides can help. In successive tutorials, we will explore techniques about working with guides, or even adding more guides.

Follow these steps to show or hide guides in PowerPoint 365 for Windows:

1. Launch PowerPoint and open a Blank Presentation, as shown in Figure 2, below. Note that there are no guides visible by default.
2. 
   Figure 2: Default PowerPoint interface with no Guides visible
2. To enable guides, select the View tab of the Ribbon and make sure you select the Guides check-box, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 3, below.
3. 
   Figure 3: Guides check-box selected
4. Conversely, if you want to hide guides again, just deselect the Guides check-box, as shown in Figure 3, above.
5. To turn on the visibility of the guides, you can use the keyboard shortcut Alt + F9. Use the same shortcut key to toggle it away.
   

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3. Now, you can see the guides displayed on the slide, as shown in Figure 4, below.
4. 
   Figure 4: Guides are now visible on the PowerPoint slide