Guide Options in PowerPoint 365 for Windows

Meet Priya. She's been putting together slide decks for her marketing team for three years now, and she's good at it, fast, tidy layouts, always on brand. She owns a proper Swiss Army knife too, the kind her dad gave her before a camping trip. In all these years, she's used exactly two blades on it: the main knife and the bottle opener. The rest, the scissors, the toothpick, the mysterious little hook thing, might as well not exist for all she knows.

Her PowerPoint habits look suspiciously similar. Priya knows guides. She drags them onto her slides constantly, lining up logos, aligning text boxes, keeping her layouts neat. But that's it, that's her whole toolkit. She has no idea guides can be added through a right-click menu, spawned at a precise offset, or recolored from the default grey into any of ten available shades.

If Priya sounds a little familiar, you're in good company. Most PowerPoint users, whether by habit or simply because nobody ever mentioned it, are running the two-blade version of guides. This page opens up the rest of that knife.

Here are some other Guide options:

1. Right-click to add. Stop selecting and dragging everytime you need a new guide. Right-click anywhere on the slide, and there it is, the add-guide option, waiting for you like a shortcut you didn't know existed. Once you find it, you'll wonder why you ever took the long way.
2. Add guides offset to existing ones. Here's a neat party trick: spawn a new guide at an exact offset from one you already have using right-click options. Need a grid of five evenly spaced guides? Instead of dragging each one and squinting at the ruler, let PowerPoint do the math. One guide becomes many, like dominoes falling into perfectly measured order.
3. Guides in color. Turns out grey was never mandatory, just the default PowerPoint handed you and never mentioned you could change. Ten colors are sitting there, ready to go. Color-code your margins in blue and your content blocks in orange, and suddenly your slide looks less like a spreadsheet and more like a subway map, each line instantly readable at a glance.
4. A proper Delete option. For years, the only way to get rid of a guide was to drag it off the slide and hope it landed in guide heaven. Not anymore. A dedicated Delete option now lives right there in the right-click menu. One catch though: selecting a guide and smashing the Delete key on your keyboard does absolutely nothing. Old habits, meet new rules.
5. A guide hierarchy. Guides don't just live on your slides, they also exist inside Slide Masters and Slide Layouts, each one minding its own business. Picture a building with several floors, each with its own decor, its own furniture, its own rules. Renovate the ground floor all you want, the penthouse stays exactly as it was.

When guides are made visible, two guides appear by default, as shown in Figure 1, below. Additional guides can then be added as needed, either by dragging existing guides to spawn new ones, or through options available in the right-click contextual menu.

Figure 1: Guides on the PowerPoint slide

To access guide options through the right-click contextual menu in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows, follow these steps:

1. Open PowerPoint and ensure that guides are visible. Figure 2, below, shows an empty slide with the default guides displayed.
2. 
   Figure 2: PowerPoint slide with default guides
2. Right-click on an empty area of the slide to open a contextual menu, as shown in Figure 3, below.
3. 
   Figure 3: Right-click on an empty area of your slide to bring up this menu
4. Alternatively, place your cursor precisely over an existing guide and right-click it. This brings up the contextual menu, shown in Figure 4, below.
5. 
   Figure 4: Right-click on an existing guide to bring up this menu
6. The options available in these two contextual menus are explained below, as marked in Figures 3 and 4:

   A. Add Vertical Guide

   It goes without saying that guides need to be visible on your slide before you try any of these options. The Add Vertical Guide option adds a new guide on the vertical plane of the slide. Where your new guide shows up depends upon where you summoned the right-click menu:

   Right-click on an empty area of the slide, as shown in Figure 5, below.

   
   Figure 5: Right-click on any area

   Doing so spawns a new vertical guide that is offset towards the right of an existing vertical guide, as shown in Figure 6, below. It doesn’t matter how far away from the existing guide you click, or whether you clicked leftwards or rightwards of an existing guide. Yes, this approach does not give you much control over where your new guide is added. You may have to drag the guide later and move it to a new position.

   
   Figure 6: Resultant vertical guide

   What if you started with no Guide?

   What if your slide had no Vertical Guide to begin with? In that case, where will the new guide be added?

   In that case, PowerPoint will add a new Vertical Guide right at the center of the slide, almost like restoring the default Guide.

   Similarly, right-clicking on a selected, existing vertical guide adds a new vertical guide that is offset towards the right of the selected, existing vertical guide. This approach works best if you want to add a new guide right next to an existing guide.

   Right-clicking on a selected, existing horizontal guide adds a new vertical guide that is perpendicular to the horizontal guide you selected. This approach works best if you want to add a new guide at an exact position.

   B. Add Horizontal Guide

   Adds a new guide on the horizontal plane of the slide. The three ways you add a horizontal guide work exactly like the three ways in which you add a vertical guide (explained in the preceding section).

   C. Color

   This option is available only when you right-click an existing guide, as shown in Figure 4, previously on this page. You can choose from 10 different colors in the flyout menu, as shown in Figure 5, below. Also, notice that you need not bring up the flyout menu to access the last selected color. That's available within the main right-click menu, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 5.

   
   Figure 5: Recolor your Guides

   D. Delete

   Right-click the guide you want to remove, and then click the Delete option within the right-click menu.

   Undo May Not Work

   You cannot undo any guide operations, so be careful before you delete a guide!

3. In Figure 7, below, you can see new guides have been added both horizontally and vertically. Also, the color of some guides has been changed.
4. 
   Figure 7: More guides added and recolored
4. Make sure to save your presentation often.