Here you can specify the grid options, which are very useful for designers, for example you can check the Display smart guides when shapes are aligned or display drawing guides on the screen, but if you want to change a different grid spacing only then you can edit the Spacing value in inches and choose any other spacing value instead. Share this post: Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Email WhatsApp. Free PowerPoint Templates. Colorful PowerPoint Template. Design PowerPoint Template. Free Development PowerPoint Template. Gridlines in PowerPoint 2016 for Mac. Leave a Comment Cancel reply.

Gridlines help give you visual cues when you're formatting in PowerPoint. The default horizontal and vertical gridlines make a grid of one-inch squares. You can't change that grid size. You can change the spacing between the dots that comprise each gridline by using the Spacing option. And in Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007, you can use drawing guides to position shapes and objects on slides. Overview of gridlines and drawing guides. Gridlines make it easier to align shapes and objects by giving you a visual cue in relation to the objects and the slide, document, or worksheet.

Introducing the Slide Area
The Actual Slide
The Slide Workspace
The Scroll Bars

Introducing the Slide Area

The Slide area in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac comprises everything in thehighlighted region shown in Figure 1. Learn more about the rest ofthe PowerPoint 2011 for Mac interface here.

Figure 1: Elements of Slide Area

The Slide area includes:

The actual slide
The slide workspace (blank area surrounding the slide)
The scrollbars that let you navigate to other slides (or the same slide when you zoom the view to a larger percentage)

We discuss each of these individual interface elements next.

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Powerpoint Mac Gridlines

The Actual Slide

This is the actual slide where you can add slide objects such as text, pictures, charts, etc. When you use Slide Show view todisplay your PowerPoint presentation, you only get to see objects that are placed within this area.

You normally click on a text placeholder and type some text to replace the dummy text in the placeholder, as shownin Figure 2.

Gridlines On Powerpoint For Mac 2011 Version

Figure 2: Text added in an existing text placeholder

PowerPoint provides three extra interface features that help in placing the elements properly on the slide. These are part of theslide area but you'll be not able to see them until they are activated.

Ruler: Horizontal and vertical ruler appears at the top and to the left of the slide.
Gridlines: A grid of evenly spaced dots appears directly on the slide and help you position slide objects.
Guides: A pair of horizontal and vertical lines intersecting at the middle of the slide. You can also add moreguides as required.

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Gridlines On Powerpoint Mac

The Slide Workspace

This is the gray area behind the slide, although any object you place here can be edited and animated, they won't show up in SlideShow view.

This makes the Workspace a convenient place to store stuff that you might want to use later, or maybe a slide object animates fromthe Slide Workspace into the actual slide! Also any sound object you place in the Workspace plays, fortunately, sound is only heardand not seen!

Figure 3 shows a slide that has objects within the actual slide and in the extended Slide Workspace.

Powerpoint Gridlines Spacing

Figure 3: A slide object placed outside the slide in the Workspace

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The Scroll Bars

There are two scroll bars:

The vertical scroll bar, placed towards the right of the slide is always visible. The vertical scroll bar can be used to navigatefrom one slide to the other, to move forward and backward from one slide to the other, click one of the double-headed arrows at thebottom of the vertical scroll bar as shown in Figure 4 (highlighted in red). You can alsodrag the handle box in the vertical scroll bar and move up or down to navigate several slides at a time.
The horizontal slide bar only shows up when you zoom your slide to a larger view.

Figure 4: Scroll Bar

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Guides form a moveable grid on your slide that can be altered. Multiple guides can be added or deleted as per the designrequirements of your slide. We have already explained how you can makeguides visible on your PowerPoint slide, and howyou can add multiple guides.Guides have snap options turned on by default. So you cannot turn snapping to guides on or off. Once the guides are made visibleon the slide, all objects that venture close enough to them snap. Along withrulers, guides can help you position your slide objectswith more precision.

Follow these steps to learn how you can work effectively with Static guides:

Make sure that your Static guides are visible.If not, you can use the Ctrl+Option+Command+G shortcut keysto turn them on (and toggle them off). Other than the two default horizontal and vertical Static guides, go ahead and add twomore guides as shown in Figure 1. To learn how you can add additional guides, refer to ourAdding More Guides in PowerPoint 2011 forMac tutorial.
Figure 1: PowerPoint Slide with multiple guides
Place a shape (any shape) on your slide.In this example we placed a rectangle and applied it with apicture fill, as shownin Figure 2.
Figure 2: A rectangle with picture fill
On the second slide, we placed another rectangle with the width and height dimensions different from the width and heightdimensions of rectangle on our first slide (see Figure 3). This again has a picture fill and the guide helped usanchor the bottom left position of this rectangle to exactly match the bottom left position of the rectangle in the previousslide (compare Figures 2 and 3).
Figure 3: Rectangle with different width and height on slide 2
We were able to position the bottom left of both picture filled rectangles on successive slides identically because we movedthese shapes close to the guides. As soon as they were fairly close to the guides where we needed to position them, they justsnapped!
Save your presentation often.