As soon as you venture beyond the world of bullet lists, you’ll deal with PowerPoint slides full of elements. Text boxes, shapes, photos, and more all have to find a proper place to make a slide appealing and readable. Sometimes, that gets maddening. We’ve all fought with problems such as text that just won’t seem to come out of hiding behind a photo. This month, we cover key tips for making objects show up where they’re supposed to.

Move To The Front & Back

Let’s start with one of the most annoying of object arrangement problems: what’s in front. The last thing inserted into a slide sits “on top,” obscuring anything that happens to be behind it. Many times, you wind up with a situation such as a photo that’s inserted after text that’s supposed to appear on top of the photo. So the text hides behind the photo. To fix this problem, click the Home tab’s Arrange button in the Drawing Section.

The options here move the selected object up and down in layers. If you click the text box and choose Bring To Front, the text box shows up in front of the photo and anything else on the slide. Send To Back, as you probably guessed, puts the selected object behind everything else. Except the slide’s overall background. Even objects sent to the “back” sit on top of the slide background, so don’t worry about sending something into oblivion behind the slide itself.

The Arrange button includes a couple of similar-sounding options with different functions: Send To Back and Send Backward. The first option moves an object behind everything else. The Send Backward option moves an object back one level. If it’s on top of a stack of three objects, then clicking Send Backward will make it the second object in the stack.

In some cases, you might use these options just to figure out all the stuff stacked up together. Click what you see and choose Send To Back to reveal the next layer down. You can also start dragging objects over to the side to find what’s hidden underneath.

Groups

Grouping objects is a huge time-saver, because it lets you perform an action on multiple objects at once. It can also save your sanity if you spent a long time creating something such as a graphic made up of several individual shapes, only to realize you need it somewhere else on the slide. With grouping, you can drag the entire graphic as a unit, rather than moving and rearranging each part.

To group several objects, hold down the SHIFT key as you click each one and then press CTRL-G (or click the Arrange button and choose Group). You’ll see the familiar sizing handles change so there’s only one set for the entire group, rather than one for each individual object. Click anywhere on the group to move it, or use the sizing handles to resize and rotate the entire group as a unit. To ungroup the objects and restore them to individual parts, press CTRL-SHIFT-G (or choose Ungroup under the Arrange button).

Many users overlook the power offered by the Regroup button. Once you’ve grouped and ungrouped objects, PowerPoint remembers what you did. The next time you click one of the objects from the former group, click Arrange and choose Regroup to rebuild the old group. (If only it were so easy after your favorite band split up.)

Alignment

Use the Arrange button’s Align tools when you want to quickly tidy up several objects, such as several photos arranged across the bottom of a slide. Instead of trying to manually place the photos an equal distance apart, you can hold down the SHIFT key while clicking each photo and choose Arrange, Align, Distribute Horizontally. (Make sure Align To Slide is selected under Align.) The photos automatically stretch across the slide in a perfectly spaced pattern.

If the photos aren’t sitting exactly on the bottom of the slide, click Arrange, Align, Align Bottom, and the photos will sit on the bottom of the slide, maintaining their horizontal spacing. Use other combinations of the Arrange button’s Align options to evenly space objects vertically or align them along other edges of the slide.

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