Manipulating Shapes by Dragging Yellow Handles in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows

PowerPoint 2010 for Windows provides different types of shapes, which can be formatted by resizing, rotating, etc. When you select most shapes, you get eight resizing handles and a single rotation handle. In addition, some shapes also have one or more yellow diamond handles. These handles enable you to change some facets of the selected shape, or in some cases you can change the entire shape. Figure 1 shows a Hexagon with one yellow diamond handle and a U-turn arrow with five yellow diamond handles.

Figure 1: The Hexagon has one yellow diamond handle and the U-turn arrow has five of them

By dragging the yellow diamond handles you can do perform simple changes in the structure of the shape, such as increase/decrease the roundness of a rounded rectangle. Some shapes show more changes. The following section includes examples of how dragging the yellow diamond handle can change a shape into two completely different forms.

Dragging the diamond handle of a Hexagon shape from right to left gives you almost a rectangle, and if the diamond handle is dragged from left to right it changes the shape into a diamond, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: A Hexagon can be changed to both a rectangle and a diamond

Dragging the diamond handle of the 7 pointed Star towards the center makes the star more acute and pointed, and dragging the diamond handle outwards makes the star look almost like an oval (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: A 7 pointed star gets more pronounced and blurred

By dragging the five yellow diamond handles on a U-turn arrow, you can adjust almost every characteristic of the arrow, as shown in Figure 4. Most of the arrow shapes comprise more than one diamond handle, which alter the arrowhead, lines, curves, etc.

Figure 4: A U-turn Arrow with a modified curve and arrowhead

As you can see in Figure 5 below, a Smiley Face shape can be changed to a straight face or a sad face by merely dragging the yellow diamond handle on its lip.

Figure 5: Smiley Face shape is changed to a straight face and sad face by dragging the yellow diamond handle