Quick Tip: Making Crooked Lines Straight

One of the more widely known PowerPoint tricks is to hold down the Shift key while drawing a line to make it perfectly vertical or horizontal. But what do you do if you are cleaning up the slides of someone who doesn’t know this trick, or if a line gets nudged slightly during revisions?

You can, of course, delete and redraw the line (or lines) — but sometimes the following might be faster:

1. Select the lines to be repaired.
2. Right click on one of the lines.
3. Select “Size and position…” from the context menu.
4. Click the up arrow next to the Height input box (for horizontal lines) or next to the Width input box (for vertical lines), then click the down arrow so the value in the input box is 0. (Note: if you are only changing one line, you can directly enter “0” into the input box — in other words, you don’t need to use the arrows.)

The lines should now be perfectly horizontal or vertical.