TLC Tips of the Week:                          from Helen Olberg

This week’s tip applies to PowerPoint.

You’re creating a slide show presentation containing several slides of pictures and clipart. You have placed the same logo image on several of the slides. When you run the slide show, you notice that your logo seems to jump around when you move from slide to slide. It might be distracting to your audience.  How can you insure that the logo will always be in the same spot?

One ‘quick and dirty’ way to do this is to align your objects using displayed Grids and/or Guides. (Guides and grids will be visible throughout all your slide designs, but are not visible during the slide show and won’t print.)

Click View, Grid and Guides… to see your options.

The grid is a series of horizontal and vertical dotted lines that you can use to help align your objects more precisely, particularly in relation to each other. You can adjust the spacing between the lines of the grid, and there is a ‘snap-to’ option to force new or moved objects to position at the nearest intersection of the grid, or to another object.

(This snap-to option is turned on by default and works even when the grid is not visible. There will be times when you want to turn it off.)

Guides are not the same as grids. When you first display the guides, you will see a vertical dotted line and a horizontal dotted line. You may move either to a different location or create a duplicate. You get to locate your own objects.

·        To move one of the guide lines, click on the line in a margin of the slide and drag.

·        To create a duplicate, click on the line in a margin of the slide, hold down the Ctrl key, and drag.

·        To remove a guideline, drag it off  the slide.

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Both the grid and guides can be shown at the same time. It gets a little busy.