Edit Points: Open and Close Paths in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows

The Shapes gallery in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows consists of various shapes, both open and closed. Most of the shapes in this gallery are closed shapes (rectangle, ellipse, and triangle are some of the closed shapes). There are also a few open shapes such as the straight point to point line. Some other tools let you create both open and closed shapes. These are the Freeform Line, Curve, and Scribble tools. In addition, you can convert any closed shape into an open shape and vice versa, as you will learn in this tutorial.

Open Shape (Path)

1. Select a closed shape such as a rectangle and switch to Edit Points mode (or just right-click the shape and choose Edit Points option from the context menu). Place the cursor over any point. The cursor will change to a four-directional arrow, as shown within the top right corner of the rectangle in Figure 1.
2. 
   Figure 1: Place cursor over the point
2. Right-click to bring up the context menu, as shown in Figure 2. From this menu, choose the Open Path option.
3. 
   Figure 2: Open Path option
3. This converts the closed path into an open (open shape), as shown in Figure 3. Essentially, the single point you selected is now two points. The gap between these two points is an open space.
4. 
   Figure 3: Closed shape changed to open shape
4. Select any of these two points and drag it elsewhere, as shown in Figure 4. As you can see, the selected shape is no longer a closed shape as there is no outline path visible between these two vertexes.
5. 
   Figure 4: Opened shape

Closed Shape (Path)

You can draw an open shape with the Freeform Line, Curve, and Scribble tools.

1. Select the open shape and switch to Edit Points mode (or just right-click the shape and choose Edit Points option from the context menu). Place the cursor over one of the open points at the end of the shape (path). The cursor will change to a four-directional arrow, as shown in Figure 5.
2. 
   Figure 5: Place cursor over the opened point
2. Right-click to get the context menu, as you can see in Figure 6. From this menu, choose the Close Path option.
3. 
   Figure 6: Close Path
3. PowerPoint automatically creates a segment between the two open points and thus closes the path (closed shape), as shown in Figure 7.
4. 
   Figure 7: A Closed Path
4. The closed shape has no fill applied but you can apply any shape fill as required.