Guides in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows

Like Gridlines, Guides also allow you to position and snap your slide objects in place. When guides are enabled for the first time within PowerPoint, you can just see two guides by default. These guides are two dotted lines, one horizontal and the other vertical. They span to intersect exactly at the center of the slide, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Guides on the PowerPoint slide

By default, guides may not be visible at all 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 you working with guides, or even adding more guides. In this tutorial, you will learn how to get started with guides by showing or hiding them in PowerPoint 2013:

1. Launch PowerPoint 2013, and open a Blank Presentation as shown in Figure 2. Note that there are no guides visible by default.
2. 
   Figure 2: Default PowerPoint interface with no guides visible
2. To enable the 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.
3. 
   Figure 3: Guides check-box selected
4. Conversely, if you want to hide guides again, just deselect the Guides check-box (refer to Figure 3).
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.
6. 

   PowerPoint Keyboard Shortcuts

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3. Now you can see the guides displayed on the slide as shown in Figure 4.
4. 
   Figure 4: PowerPoint slide with default Guides