Working with Guides in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows

You have learned how to make guides visible on your PowerPoint slide, and how you can add multiple guides in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows. You can consider guides as grids that can be moved, added, or deleted. Guides has snap options turned on by default, so you cannot turn snapping to guides on or off. Once the guides are made visible on the slide, all objects that venture close enough to them snap. Along with rulers and gridlines, guides help you position your slide objects with more precision.

Follow these steps to explore how you can work effectively with guides in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows:

1. Make sure that your guides are visible. If not, you can use the Alt+F9 key to turn them on (and toggle them off). Other than the two default guides, create two more guides, as shown in Figure 1, below. To learn how you can create additional guides, look at our Add Multiple Guides in PowerPoint 2010 tutorial.
2. 
   Figure 1:Multiple guides on slide
3. 

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2. Place a shape (any shape) on your slide, in this example we placed a rectangle and filled it with a picture fill, as shown in Figure 2, below.
3. 
   Figure 2: Rectangle with picture fill
3. On the second slide we placed another rectangle that does not have the same width and height dimensions as the rectangle on our first slide does, as shown in Figure 3, below. This again has a picture fill and the guide helped us anchor the bottom left position of this rectangle to exactly match the bottom left position of the rectangle in the previous slide. Compare Figures 2 and 3.
4. 
   Figure 3: Rectangle with different width and height on slide 2
4. We were able to position the bottom left of both rectangles on successive slides identically because we moved these shapes close to the guides, as soon as they were fairly close to the guides where we needed to position them, they just snapped!
5. Save your presentation often.