When you insert any shape into your PowerPoint slide, more
often than not you will want to make some changes to the default shape that you end up with. Mainly, you may want to
resize and rotate the shape. This is something we do a lot in
our everyday life, like rearranging our work desks, or even changing the position of our favorite chair so that we feel more
comfortable. Similarly, all objects on your slide need to be arranged in a way that feels appropriate, rotation is one way of making
this change happen. In PowerPoint 2016 for Windows, rotation can be applied
in more than one way. Follow these steps to get started:
- Select the shape you want to rotate, so that the white rotation handle is visible (highlighted in red
within Figure 1).

Figure 1: Select the shape
- Click the white handle so that your cursor changes to a circular arrow (shown in Figure 1).
- Now drag the white handle rightwards or leftwards to rotate, as shown in Figure 2. The rotation always happens
around the center of the selected shape.

Figure 2: Drag the white rotation handle to rotate your shape
- To get more control over the rotation, hold the Shift key while you drag. This will rotate the
shape in 15 degree increments. At each increment of 15 degrees, you will find that the shape snaps into place, almost as if a magnet is
pulling it into position. Thus, if you rotate rightwards through four 15 degree snaps, you would have rotated your shape by 60 degrees.
Tip: You can also rotate without using a mouse. To do that, hold the Alt key, and then press either the
Left or Right arrow key to rotate the shape in 15 degree increments clockwise/counter-clockwise.
- To rotate the shape in 90 degree increments, select the shape. This activates the Drawing Tools Format tab on the
Ribbon (see Figure 3). Within the
Arrange group, click the Rotate button to access the Rotate drop-down gallery (see
Figure 3 again). Choose either Rotate Right 90o or
Rotate Left 90o (highlighted in red, within Figure 3). To rotate
any shape by 180 degrees, click any of these Rotate options twice.

Figure 3: Rotate button
Tip: If you have worked aplenty with text in PowerPoint, you'll notice that text within the shape can be rotated by 90°
and 270°, but not by 180°. Explore our
Rotate Text 180° within Shapes in PowerPoint 2016
to find a workaround for this problem.
- Within the Rotate drop-down gallery (refer to Figure 3 above), you can click
More Rotation Options (highlighted in blue within Figure 3, above) to bring
up the Format Shape Task Pane. Make sure
you select the Resize tab, highlighted in blue within Figure 4. Change the
Rotation option (highlighted in red, within Figure 4) to any value
from -3600o to 3600o or type a zero rotation value to restore the original placement of the shape.

Figure 4: Format Shape Task Pane
Counterpoint
Now the question that arises is why PowerPoint lets you do a 3600-degree rotation at all? Our guess
is that this has nothing to do with mere rotation since a full rotation is only 360 degrees, and 3600 degrees would suggest 10
rotations! Yes, this has its use when you want to spin-animate an object 10 times, but why is this option available for stationary objects?
- Save your presentation often.
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