PowerPoint Shapes

PowerPoint comes with an extensive set of ready-made shapes that you can use to easily draw shapes on your slides. The Shapes gallery contains more than a hundred common shapes and lines, such as stars, arrows, and speech balloons.

Insert a Shape

1. Click the Insert tab.
2. Click Shapes.

   A menu appears showing all available shapes.

3. Select the shape you want to insert.
   
4. Click where you want to place the shape, or click and drag to “draw” the shape onto the screen.

   To draw a straight line, perfect square or circle, or to constrain the dimensions of other shapes, press and hold the Shift key as you drag.

   

The shape is inserted onto the slide and the Format contextual tab appears on the ribbon under Drawing Tools.

Modify Shapes

There are a few different ways to modify the shapes in a presentation. You can drag them to a new location on the slide, resize them, or use the adjustment handle to change the shape’s most prominent feature.

1. To move a shape, click it and drag it to a new location on the slide.
   
2. To change a shape’s size, click a sizing handle and drag to the desired size.

   Press and hold the Shift key as you drag to maintain the shape’s aspect ratio.

3. To adjust how the shape looks, click and drag the shape’s adjustment handle.

   Some shapes have more than one adjustment handle, while others don’t have any at all.

   

Change a Shape

If you decide that you’d like to use a different shape instead of the one that you’ve already added and formatted, you can switch it out. This can be really helpful if the shape already has effects or styles applied to it because they'll be applied to the new shape.

1. Select a shape.
2. Click Edit Shape.
3. Select Change Shape.
   
4. Choose a new shape to use instead.
   

The shape is updated, but the formatting and size remain the same.