Drawing a Perfect Circle in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows

Drawing shapes is drop-dead easy with the vast repertoire of readymade shapes available in PowerPoint. You can easily insert these shapes with a click or two, but once in a while, you may get stumped. One such scenario is when you need to draw a circle, you'll find that PowerPoint's Shape gallery has no Circle shape! Don't worry, all is not lost because there is an Oval shape that can be used to draw a perfect circle.

Follow these steps to learn how you can draw a perfect circle in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows:

1. Launch PowerPoint. Most of the time, PowerPoint will open with a new slide in a presentation. You can change the slide layout to Blank by selecting Home tab | Layout | Blank.
2. Within the Home or Insert tab of the Ribbon, click the Shapes button to bring up the Shapes drop-down gallery, as shown in Figure 1, below. Select the Oval shape, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 1.
3. 
   Figure 1: Oval shape selected
4. Use any of these two options to place a perfect circle shape on your slide:
• Click anywhere on the slide to add the Oval shape in a predefined size (typically 1 inch x 1 inch), as shown in Figure 2, below. Since the height and the width are the same, this oval is already a circle!
• For resizing, hold down the Shift key while dragging any of the four corner handles to retain the circle proportion (preventing the circle from becoming an oval).
• 
  Figure 2: Circle shape placed on the slide
• Alternatively, click and drag on the slide along with the Shift key held down while dragging to constrain the height and width proportions to be equal, as shown in Figure 3, below. Optionally, you can hold the Ctrl key (in addition to the Shift key) to draw a circle from the center.
• 
  Figure 3: Drawing a circle while holding the Shift key
• The resultant circle can also be resized as required.
3. Save your presentation often.