Change the Unit of Measurement in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac

Discover how to change the unit of measurement in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac by adjusting your Mac’s regional settings. This tutorial explains the available measurement options and helps you work more accurately with slide layouts, shapes, and object positioning for a smoother presentation design experience.

Here's a fun little imbalance in the Microsoft universe: Mac users get to pick from inches, centimeters, points, or picas, a full buffet of measurement options. Windows users, meanwhile, get exactly two choices on the menu: inches or centimeters, take it or leave it. It's the software equivalent of one sibling getting the deluxe ice cream sundae bar while the other gets vanilla or chocolate and nothing else.

The reason comes down to who's actually in charge of the setting. On Windows, PowerPoint doesn't make this decision on its own, it simply reads whatever Regional Settings are configured in Windows itself, and inches or centimeters is as far as that setting goes. On the Mac, PowerPoint keeps its own separate preferences for measurement units, untethered from the operating system, which is exactly why Mac users get the fuller menu. Whichever unit gets picked, its main job is a quiet one: it changes what the rulers inside PowerPoint display, nothing more dramatic than that.

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In this tutorial, you will learn how to change these measurement units in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac:

1. Launch PowerPoint. Select the PowerPoint | Preferences menu option, as shown in Figure 1, below.
2. 
   Figure 1: Preferences option selected within the PowerPoint menu
2. Doing so opens the PowerPoint Preferences window, as shown in Figure 2, below. Make sure that the View tab is selected. Click on the Ruler units list box, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 2.
3. 
   Figure 2: Ruler units list box within the PowerPoint Preferences window
3. In the resultant drop-down list, you can see four different options for unit of measurement: Inches, Centimeters, Points, and Picas, as shown in Figure 3, below. You can see a check mark in front of the currently active option. Inches is active in Figure 3. This indicates that this is the current unit of measurement. Click on any other unit of measurement that you want to change to. In Figure 3, you can see that Centimeters has been highlighted, click to make it active.
4. 
   Figure 3: Ruler unit drop-down list
4. Click the OK button, as shown in Figure 2, previously on this page, to apply the change to the unit of measurement.