Edit Points: Open and Close Paths in PowerPoint 2007 for Windows

The Shapes Gallery in PowerPoint consists various shapes, both open and closed. Most of the shapes in this gallery are closed shapes, for example, a Rectangle, an Ellipse, and a Triangle. There are also a few open shapes such as the straight point to point line. Also, there are some drawing tools let you draw 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 a Shape (Path)

1. Select a closed shape such as a Rectangle and switch to Edit Points mode (for freeform shapes, just right-click, and from the contextual menu choose Edit Points option). Place the cursor over any point. The cursor will change to four directional arrow, as shown in Figure 1.
2. 
   Figure 1: Cursor placed over the vertex
2. Right-click to get the contextual menu, as you can see in Figure 2. In this contextual menu, select the Open Path option.
3. 
   Figure 2: Open Path option
3. This converts the closed path to an open path resulting in an open shape, as shown in Figure 3. Essentially, the single point you selected is now two points. The gap between these two points is the open space.
4. 
   Figure 3: Closed shape changed to open shape
Note: In PowerPoint, the terms vertex and point are often used interchangeably.
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 available between these two new vertexes.
5. 
   Figure 4: New point dragged apart

Close a 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 (just right-click, and from the contextual menu, choose the Edit Points option). 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: Cursor placed over the open point
2. Right-click to get the contextual menu, as you can see in Figure 6. From this contextual menu, choose Close Path option.
3. 
   Figure 6: Close Path option
3. PowerPoint automatically creates a path segment between the two open points, and thus closes the path resulting in a closed shape, as shown in Figure 7.
4. 
   Figure 7: Open shaped converted into a closed Shape
4. The closed shape has no fill applied but you can apply any shape fill as required.