Additional Shape Operations

Best practice

Spend some time to get accustomed to the slideRush shape actions. They will significantly increase your PowerPoint productivity and save you a lot of time.
Ribbon buttons

ZOrder

Single click brings the selected shape forwards/backwards one level. Double-click to send the shape to the front or the back.

Select similar shapes

Select a single shape (reference shape) that will act as reference to search for similar shapes on the current slide.

You can select similar shapes based on the following properties:

  • Type: selects shape of the same type (e.g. picture, textbox) as the reference shape on the current slide. Note that this uses PowerPoint’s internal classification of shape types. This means that even though two shapes might look similar to the user (e.g. two textboxes) they could internally be categorized as different shape types.
  • Fill color: selects all shapes on the current slide that have the same fill color as the reference shape.
  • Size: selects shapes with the identical dimensions as the reference shape.

Hide / unhide shapes

Select any number of shapes and click on hide to temporarily hide them. To unhide select one or more slides and click on unhide.

Convert table to shapes

Select a single table in PowerPoint and click on convert table to shapes to convert the regular table to individual cells. This is especially useful when used in conjunction with the spacing tools (see below).

Example of table convertion to shapes

Spacing

Use the spacing buttons to quickly change the horizontal or vertical spacing between shapes.

Ribbon buttons

Spacing can be changed for any number of selected shapes. The incremental increase/decrease in spacing is defined by the PowerPoint grid settings (see picture below) that can be accessed by clicking the arrow in the bottom right corner (see picture above).

Grid settings

The resize shapes toggle increases or decreases the spacing by resizing the shapes.