Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Aligning and Arranging Graphics in PowerPoint”.
In this article, we’re going to look at the arrange options in powerpoint and you can see here. I have a powerpoint presentation on the topic of animation in the classroom and i have several slides on that topic. But here on the second slide, i would like to arrange the elements of what could be an animation and i’d like to put them on this slide in a way that makes some sense. So i’ve just gone into insert online pictures and i’ve searched for a series of pictures like clouds, mountains, etc, and then i’ve clicked to insert them into this powerpoint presentation and onto the slide, and you can see it’s just a jumbled mess now, of course, i could Just click and drag and put things where i want them to be, and in many cases that’s perfect, that’s exactly what you want, but there are some arrange options on the home tab home ribbon in the drawing group.
You can go to arrange, and this can be very helpful. For example, let’s say i want the mountain to be at the center of the slide. I could select the mountain go to arrange, position, objects align, i could align center, go back, arrange, align, align middle. So now it’s in the dead center of this slide, so that’s just one example of how useful this can be. Now, let’s try something a little different.
Let’S say with these clouds, i don’t want them to be dead center. What if, instead, i want them to be perfectly spaced apart from each other, and not only that, but i would like a third cloud as well, so i just copy pasted to make a third cloud and what i’ll do is i’ll drag this cloud all the way Over here to the right, and then these other two are bunched together. So now i can click on one of the clouds hold the shift key and then click on the other two clouds. All three are selected.
Now i can go to the arrange group and choose a line distribute horizontally, so you’ll notice that when i did that it didn’t change the position of the last cloud, nor did it change the position of the first cloud. All it did was space. The second one perfectly between the first and the last clouds now this becomes even more useful, the more clouds that you have or the more items that you’re trying to space. Equally that you have so in this case, i’ve got lots of clouds and i’m putting the first one exactly where i want it to be i’ll, put the last one exactly where i want it to be, and then i’ll hold the shift key select.
All of the clouds that i want to be able to affect – hopefully i get them all and then go to the arrange, button, go to align and now distribute horizontally. I click and now they’re, all perfectly spaced horizontally. It looks like i may have missed one of the clouds, but you get the idea now: let’s try it the other way. What if we align and distribute vertically that time it took the cloud that was at the top and the cloud that was at the bottom and left them alone, but the ones in between it, distributed perfectly from top to bottom, so arrange a line is very helpful When you’re designing a slide in powerpoint, it can help you align everything to the dead center and there’s the one that escaped me. It can also help you align vertically so to the middle of the screen, or in this case to each other, and it can also help you distribute equally now. Of course, there’s also arrange a line left or right that will put it at the far left or the far right of your slide, so those other align options can be useful as well same with top and bottom now, if you have more than one item selected, Sometimes that works a little differently.
So i’m selecting this cloud and this cloud and then i go to arrange a line align top. It put it at the top. This one was already at the top, so it stayed there, so you may need to practice with this. A little bit when i chose a line left that time, you’ll notice that they didn’t both go to the far left, the one that was most to the left. That was the standard and the other one moved to align with that. So that’s why, when i have the cloud down here and i select it and then i also select this cloud and i go to arrange a line if i say: align top it’ll pick the one that’s closest to the top and then make them align. So it takes a little bit of practice to really understand. What’S about to happen when you use the align options.
Personally, i just love, align middle align center and distribute horizontally and vertically those are the ones i use the most next. Let’S look at a couple of other arrange options that we have you’ll notice that my climber here is in the wrong order on this slide. I must have brought this climber in first and then the mountain after, because you can see the mountains in front of the climber and that doesn’t make a lot of sense.
So to fix that, i can use the arrange button. I select the mountain climber, go to arrange and i can choose bring to front now. The mountain climber is in front of the clouds.
The tree, the rocks the sun everything now. Sometimes that’s not exactly what you want. Instead of bringing to front you may just want to bring forward so not all the way to the front, but one step forward. You can also do similar things with send to back or send backward.
So i would like to send the climber backward so that she’s behind the tree, but in front of the mountain and in front of the rock. Let’S try that so i select the mountain climber i go to arrange instead of send to back. That would go all the way to the back. I don’t want to do that.
I just say send backward, it doesn’t seem like it did anything, but it did. Let’S try it again send backward so after i’ve sent backward a few times. What should happen is that tree should then be in front and there it is so now the tree is in front of the climber, but look so is the rock now another way, probably a faster way that i could have done. That is, i could have brought the tree forward, but at this point i want to send the rock back.
So i click on the rock there on the home tab home ribbon. There’S the arrange group and i can send the rock backward and i’ll have to do that a few times as well. Okay, there we go so now that establishes where the rock is where the tree is. The tree is in front of the rock and the climber is between the tree and the rock. So those are some great features to help you layer, a scene or layer, a powerpoint slide, so that certain things are on top of other things or underneath or i should say in front of or behind other things on the slide. So now that that’s done, i can put these characters where i want them to be: maybe i’ll resize the mountain, make it a little bit bigger or a lot bigger, and then let’s go back to the clouds and give them some attention.
Let’S say i’ve spaced those clouds out the way i want them to be, and now i want to be able to move them all to the left just a little bit. Of course, i could do that each one separately, click and drag click and drag this one and this one, but a lot of times it’s easier to group things like this that go together now to really do this effectively. I need to delete a few of the clouds i put in way too many clouds.
Okay, so i’ve got these three clouds, and maybe i want them to look something like that. I think actually before i group them, i want to click on a range and choose rotate and i’ll just rotate, not left 90 degrees or right 90 degrees. That would make for a very vertical cloud and of course i could use this arrow as well to adjust the rotation, but instead, i’m just going to go here to arrange and i’ll go to rotate and, in addition to rotating 90 degrees left and right notice that There is an option to flip vertically and flip horizontally, and these are great options, especially when you’re reusing an image twice.
It can be repetitive and kind of boring to have the same image, but if you flip one or more than one it can change the look. A little bit and make it more interesting, so i’ll flip this one vertically, all right so now there’s a little bit of variety in the clouds, not a ton, but some variety. So having done that, i’m going to select each of the clouds i’m holding the shift. Key and clicking on all the clouds, then i’ll go to arrange and i’ll choose group now that i’ve done that look they’re all considered to be one object, so i can move them as one and it saves a lot of time.
It makes things very convenient as you’re designing a slide in powerpoint. Now what if you ever decide that you would like to break those apart and have them not be a group? Well select the item. The clouds in this case go to arrange and there’s an option to ungroup, and now i can click away and then back on one of the clouds and that way i can maybe provide a little more variety with their position and then i can select them all Again, holding the shift key and clicking to select everything i want to group going back to arrange, i can choose group and now i can move them all at once now. This is another example of when order is important.
I guess the clouds could be in front of the mountain, but probably not the tree, and i think it makes more sense for them to be behind the mountain. So i can just select the clouds go to arrange and i can send them backward one step at a time or i could just send to the back all the way to the back and then move them exactly where i want them to be. So i hope that you’ll look on the home tab home ribbon and look for the arrange button. That’S on the drawing group look for that anytime you’re, using lots of elements on one particular slide. Maybe it’s pictures plus text plus videos or clip art, or things like that, but anytime, you have a lot of elements on the screen at once. It’S a good idea to look at that arrange button and see what it can do to help. You arrange things on the screen.
The way you want them to be thanks for watching. I hope you found this tutorial to be helpful. If you did please like follow and subscribe and when you do subscribe, click the bell next to the subscribe button. If you do you’ll be notified whenever i post another video and if you want to support my channel, become a supporter of mine on patreon you’ll see a link to that in the description below .