Guides in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows

Like Gridlines, Guides also allow you to position and snap your slide objects in place. For most professional slide designers, creating slides without guides would be very worrisome! When guides are enabled for the first time within PowerPoint, you can just see two guides by default. These guides are two dotted lines, one horizontal and the other vertical. They span to intersect exactly at the center of the slide, as shown in Figure 1, below.

Figure 1: Guides on a PowerPoint slide

By default, guides may not be visible on your slides. Making them visible though can help while working with positioning any of your slide objects. Also, if you need to position certain objects at the same position on successive slides, guides can be an amazing help. In successive tutorials, we will explore techniques that help working with guides, or even adding more guides.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to get started with guides by showing or hiding them in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows:

1. Launch PowerPoint, and open a Blank Presentation, as shown in Figure 2, below. Note that there are no guides visible by default.
2. 
   Figure 2: Default PowerPoint interface with no Guides visible
2. To enable guides, select the View tab of the Ribbon, and make sure you select the Guides check-box, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 3, below.
3. 
   Figure 3: Guides check-box selected
4. Conversely, if you want to hide guides again, just deselect the Guides check-box, as shown in Figure 3, above.
5. To turn on the visibility of the guides, you can use the keyboard shortcut Alt + F9. Use the same shortcut key to toggle it away.


PowerPoint Keyboard Shortcuts

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3. Now, you can see the guides displayed on the slide, as shown in Figure 4, below.
4. 
   Figure 4: Guides are now visible on the PowerPoint slide