Distribute Horizontally and Vertically in PowerPoint 2010

In PowerPoint you can distribute your objects and shapes horizontally or vertically. This feature is under Format -> Align menu and is very handy to distribute objects in your slides automatically. Instead of manually moving your objects or shapes to the desired placement, you can easily align the objects and distribute them to keep the same spacing between objects and shapes. Distribute shapes can also be applied to text objects which is very helpful to distribute paragraphs and other text labels used in your slides. For example, we have used this feature to distribute the textboxes in the Value Chain diagram that you can download from Michael Porter’s article.

Let’s see how the distribute objects work in PowerPoint.

If we have the following shapes placed in the slide, we may want to distribute them vertically to keep the same spacing between the shapes.

First, select the objects and shapes you want to distribute and then go to Drawing Tools -> Format -> Align button.

As soon as you click on Distribute Horizontally you will see the following results.

This is exactly how horizontal distribution works.

However, you can do more with these features and align the shapes accordingly. For example, if we want to keep the shapes aligned to the center, we may click on Align Center option and here you have the results.

In addition to other nice features of PowerPoint 2007 and 2010 (for example the shape set operations and background removal tool) distributing objects in the slide can be really helpful to make your PowerPoint templates and presentations more attractive and its objects and graphics well aligned.