Working with Snap to Grid in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows

You have learned how to make gridlines visible on your PowerPoint slide, and how you can change settings for grids in PowerPoint 2010. Once you have these settings in place, you must play around with the Snap to Grid option to determine how it can help you position slide objects with more precision.

Follow these steps to learn more:

1. Place a shape (any shape) on your slide, in this example we placed a rectangle with a picture fill as shown in Figure 1.
2. 
   Figure 1: Rectangle with picture fill
2. 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 (see Figure 2). This again has a picture fill and the gridlines 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 1 and 2).
3. 
   Figure 2: Rectangle with different width and height on slide 2
3. We were able to position the bottom left of both rectangles on successive slides identically because we moved these shapes close to the gridlines, as soon as they were fairly close to the gridlines where we needed to position them, they just snapped! If we had turned off the Snap to Grid option, then the shapes would not have snapped to the grid.
Note: The Snap objects to other objects option that you can select in the Grids and Guides dialog box also works in the same way. It just snaps selected objects to other slide objects rather than the gridlines. This option also needs to be turned on in the Grids and Guides dialog box. See our Snap to Grid Settings in PowerPoint 2010 tutorial for more info.