Guides in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows

Like rulers and gridlines, guides in PowerPoint allow you to position and snap your slide objects in place. When you enable guides using the steps illustrated on this page, you see just two guides by default. These guides are two dotted lines, one horizontal and the other vertical. They span to intersect at the very center of the slide, as shown in Figure 1, below.

Figure 1: Guides on the PowerPoint slide

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

In this tutorial, you will learn how to get started with guides by showing or hiding them in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows:

1. Launch PowerPoint. Typically, the program opens a new presentation with a blank slide, as shown in Figure 2, below. As you can see, there are no guides visible by default.
2. 
   Figure 2: Default PowerPoint interface with no guides visible
2. To make the guides visible, select the View tab of the Ribbon, locate the Show group, and enable the Guides check-box, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 3, below.
3. 
   Figure 3: Enable the Guides check-box in the View tab of the Ribbon
3. Enabling the Guides option will result in a check mark to indicate that the guides have been turned on, as shown in Figure 4, below. Conversely, you can also uncheck this same option to turn off the guides.
4. 
   Figure 4: Guides check box selected
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.


PowerPoint Keyboard Shortcuts

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Explore our PowerPoint Keyboard Shortcuts and Sequences Ebook that is updated for all PowerPoint versions.

4. Now, you will see guides displayed on the slide, as shown in Figure 5, below.
5. 
   Figure 5: Guides are now visible on the PowerPoint slide