If you have several images on a slide, you can align your objects both horizontally and vertically for a more professional look. There are guides and gridlines available to help you align objects manually, and there are options to align objects for you automatically. Let’s see how it’s done.
Manually Aligning Objects
In this example, there are three objects on the slide. Point to the first object and drag upward or downward using your mouse. Once the object is centered either horizontally and vertically, a guideline will display.
You can also use guides and gridlines to help you align your objects. From the “View” tab, click “Guides.” Two dotted lines then show up—one aligned to the horizontal center of the slide and one to the vertical center.
Additionally, you can turn on gridlines that can help you align object elsewhere on your slide. From the “View” tab, click “Gridlines.” More dotted lines then display to help you align your objects. You can drag your objects and use the gridlines to align them accordingly.
In this example, we moved each of the three objects upward to align them using the uppermost horizontal gridline:
Automatically Aligning Objects
Now, let’s take a look at how to align objects automatically. First, select all the objects to be aligned. If this consists of all objects on your slide, you can press Ctrl+A to select everything. To select specific objects, click on the first object to select it. Then, while holding down the Shift key, click on other objects to select them each in turn. In this example, we have three images selected, and we would like to align all of them both horizontally and vertically.
From the Format tab, click the “Align” button. As you can see, you have commands here for aligning slides horizontally (the top group), vertically (the second group), and for distributing them (which makes them spaced equally apart from one another). Here, we’re aligning our selected object vertically along their middles.
This aligned all the selected objects vertically. Now, we want to make sure they are spaced equally apart, so with all three objects still selected, we’re going back to that menu and choosing the “Distribute Horizontally” command.
Here’s the final result, with all images aligned both horizontally and vertically.
And that’s all there is to it!
