How to Align Shapes in Consulting

Imagine the painful frustration of having to click through your cursor a couple of times every time you need to align items to their middle side using PowerPoint’s Arrange commands. And it's a deck full of timelines. Can it get any worse??

Well, with auxi, it certainly can’t.

• Select all the shapes you want to align to the middle side, first shape you select is the anchor ⚓️
• Find the Align Middle command through the Smart Bar, or use the keyboard shortcut A + M for the same result.

⤷ Now the middle child doesn't feel left out. Pun intended.

Align Middle

Alignments are the basics of PowerPoint. It’s true that PPT provides you with some grids to help you align objects on your slide, but it can get very messy and time consuming if you build slides several hours a day.

Luckily, we wrote them again so they run faster and offer more freedom to the user!

Select items. Home. Arrange. Align. Align Center.
Might as well write your full name to the sixth father. 😒😒

• This is the twin sister of Align Middle, but you can use this one when your items are one after the other vertically.
• Select your anchor shape then select other shapes. Choose the Align Center command through the Smart Bar or just press A + C on your keyboard as a quick shortcut.

⤷ Now all your items are aligned to their center in a vertical manner.

Align Center

Imagine having to run the most used commands on PowerPoint manually, for a large number of slides, with a huge number of items on each. Yeah, not fun. At all.
Here’s the solution:

• Use these shortcuts to run these commands faster:
- A + L for Align Left
- A + T for Align Top
- A + B for Align Bottom
- A + R for Align Right
• You can use the Smart Bar to do these as well so you can use the follow-up functions after each.
• The anchor shape concept here applies. Select the shape you want the rest to follow first.

⤷ Now you can run these commands like playing the piano! 🎹

Alignments

Let’s all admit we draw the worst circles ever. I mean we’ve all tried to perfect our circles as kids but every single point on the circle comes out with a different radius. 🤣 And I mean, if that didn’t work out, making central diagrams would?? I don’t think so :p

• This feature has saved me so much time and will save yours too. Here’s how:
a. Select your shapes.
b. Hit A + Z to Align Central.
c. You can also find Align Central in the Smart Bar.
d. Decrease or increase the radius as you wish.

⤷ Aligning in a central form has never been easier!

Align Central

Aligning a matrix takes much more than it should when you manually align your items. You gotta make sure the spaces between items are equal, and that the items beside each other are fitting in place.

Here’s how we do it 95% faster:

• Select all the shapes you want inside your matrix, open the smart bar, then type and select Align Matrix.
• A grid will pop up. This will help you decide on the final layout to fit your content. Feel free to choose from column or row configurations to N x N matrices. All up to you.
• You can also use the keyboard shortcut to apply this command by hitting A + X.

⤷ Voila! Matrix aligned and done in nearly no time.