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Align Shapes to Center of Slide in PowerPoint 2013

Learn how to center a shape on a PowerPoint 2013 slide.

Author: Geetesh Bajaj

Product/Version: Microsoft PowerPoint 2013
OS: Windows 7 and 8

Date Created: September 10th 2013
Last Updated: September 10th 2013

We have already shown you how to align shapes in PowerPoint 2013 -- however for alignment to work, you need to have more than one shape (or any other slide object) selected so that they can align to each other. However, you may want to align just one shape (or even a single group of shapes) to the exact center of your slide. Fortunately, that is easy to achieve, as explained in the following steps:

Select the shape (or a group of shapes) placed on the slide, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Shape selected on the PowerPoint slide
Access the Home tab of the Ribbon, and within the Drawing group, click the Arrange button to bring up the Arrange drop-down gallery that you can see in Figure 2, below.

Figure 2: Align to Slide option selected within the Align sub-gallery
Within the Arrange drop-down gallery, click the Align option to bring up the Align sub-gallery (see Figure 2 again). Within this sub-gallery, note that the Align to Slide option may or may not be selected -- its selection status is indicated by a check mark in front of the option (highlighted in red within Figure 2). If there's no check mark visible, click once to activate this option.
With the Align to Slide option selected, click both the Align Center and the Align Middle options (highlighted in blue within Figure 2, above) one after the other.
This will position the selected shape to the exact center of your slide, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Shape centered to the slide

Tip: If you need to center several shapes on a slide without altering their distance from each other, select all those shapes and group them. Then select the group, and follow the steps explained on this page. Once you have centered them, you can ungroup them. There is one caveat to this solution though -- if your individual slide objects were animated before you grouped them, you would lose their animation characteristics by grouping and ungrouping them.

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