Stop nudging boxes with the arrow keys. PowerPoint has had proper alignment tools the whole time - they live two clicks deep under Arrange, and they will tidy a messy slide faster than your eye ever will.
How to do it
- Select the objects. Click the first, Shift-click the rest - or drag a box around all of them.
- Go to Home > Arrange > Align. (The same menu appears under Shape Format > Align when shapes are selected.)
- Check the bottom of the menu before anything else: Align Selected Objects should be ticked, not Align to Slide. The wrong mode here is why Align "didn't work" the last time you tried it.
- Pick your line: Align Top for a row, Align Left for a column, Align Middle or Align Center to snap everything onto a shared centreline.
- Same menu, one more click: Distribute Horizontally (or Vertically) to make the spacing even. The two outermost objects stay where they are; everything between them spreads out equally.
Why it works
Every object on a slide sits in an invisible rectangular bounding box, and Align does its geometry on those boxes, not on whatever your eye reads as the edge of the shape. Align Top matches box tops, Align Middle matches vertical midpoints, and Distribute measures the span between the two outermost boxes and divides the gaps equally. That is why nudging never quite converges - you are matching pixels by eye, one object at a time, while Align solves the whole arrangement in a single pass.
It is also why an aligned slide can still look faintly off: a shape with a drop shadow or a rotated object aligns by its box, not by its visible ink. The geometry is right; trust it over your monitor.
When not to use it
Distribute needs three or more objects before it has anything to space out. And if the same arrangement has to repeat across a deck, aligning by hand on every slide is the wrong tool - set drawing guides or fix the layout in the Slide Master, and let the slides inherit it.
Once the boxes are lined up, make them earn their keep: Tuesday's Build It, Build a self-updating summary slide in PowerPoint linked to Excel, fills an aligned slide with numbers that update themselves.