Drawing Multiple Shapes Quickly in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows

Sometimes, you need to draw multiple shapes of the same type on a slide—maybe a hundred smiley faces on one slide, or even a hundred stars on a dark blue slide, as shown in Figure 1, below.

Figure 1: Multiple Stars on a dark blue slide

Yes, you can do so in PowerPoint by duplicating existing shapes but when did you see a night sky where each star was the exact same size? So that leaves out the Ctrl+dragging and Ctrl+D duplicating tricks, since shapes that are exactly the same in size as the other certainly do not look organic.

Yes, we are back to inserting single shapes on the slide! Essentially, you select a shape from the Shapes gallery and then draw your shape. Then, you revisit the Shapes gallery to select that same shape again and place another instance. Yes, that means a hundred trips to the Shapes gallery and drawing on the slide as many times—there has to be an easier way. Indeed, there is an option to make things simpler and it is called the Lock Drawing Mode option. We will see how this option makes the task of drawing organic-looking shapes a lot easier and faster.

Follow these steps to place multiple shapes organically in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows:

1. Access the Shapes drop-down gallery from the Home or Insert tabs of the Ribbon. Decide upon the shape you want to draw, as shown in Figure 2, below.
2. 
   Figure 2: Decide upon a shape
2. Now, don't click on the shape you want yet. Rather, right-click the shape and choose the Lock Drawing Mode option from the resultant menu, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 3, below. This action will make the selected shape sticky, as in you won't have to go back to the Shapes gallery again once you're done drawing a shape.
3. 
   Figure 3: Lock Drawing Mode option
3. Draw as many instances of the selected shape as you want on the slide. Figure 4, below, shows the selected Smiley Face shape has been drawn on the slide multiple times in different sizes.

Draw Proportionate Shapes

Hold the Shift key to draw the shape proportionately.
4. 
   Figure 4: Draw several instances of the same shape
5. Once you are done with drawing the number of shapes you want, you can disable the Lock Drawing Mode option by pressing the Esc key.