Working with Guides in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac

Guides form a moveable grid on your slide that can be altered. Multiple guides can be added or deleted as per the design requirements of your slide. We have already explained how you can make guides visible on your PowerPoint slide, and how you can add multiple guides. Guides have 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, guides can help you position your slide objects with more precision.

Follow these steps to learn how you can work effectively with guides in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac:

1. Make sure that your guides are visible. If not, you can use the Ctrl + Option + Command + G keyboard shortcut to turn them on and also toggle them off. Other than the two default horizontal and vertical guides, go ahead and add two more guides, as shown in Figure 1, below. To learn how you can add additional guides, refer to our Adding More Guides in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac tutorial.
2. 
   Figure 1: PowerPoint Slide with multiple guides
3. 

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2. Place a shape (any shape) on your slide. In this example, we placed a rectangle and applied it with a picture fill, as shown in Figure 2, below.
3. 
   Figure 2: A rectangle with picture fill
3. On the second slide, we placed another rectangle with the width and height dimensions different from the width and height dimensions of the rectangle on our first slide, 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 picture-filled 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.