How to Work with the Productivity Pane

Introduction

The Productivity Pane provides you with all you need to get done more in less time:

Collection of most important insertion, alignment and resizing functions
Direct access to shape and textbox attributes: usually hidden somewhere in the PowerPoint pane
presentaid libraries and additional functionalities: at your fingertips

You can easily enable/disable the Productivity Pane by either clicking the respective button in the presentaid ribbon, or by changing the configuration in the presentaid configuration menu.

Functionality

The Productivity Pane consolidates alignment, distribution, sizing, positioning, rotation, and spacing tools into a single always-accessible panel.

Note: We are continuously working on improving the Productivity Pane. Your presentaid version might already have more functionalities than described here.

Align with Ctrl: Master Alignment

The six alignment buttons in the pane - Align Left, Align Center, Align Right, Align Top, Align Middle and Align Bottom - work in two ways:

	What happens
Click	PowerPoint's own alignment: the selected shapes are aligned to each other. A single selected shape is aligned to the slide.
Ctrl+click	presentaid's Master Alignment: the selected shapes are aligned to the reference shape, which itself stays where it is. For example, Ctrl+click on Align Left lines up every left edge with the left edge of the reference shape.

Ctrl+click on an alignment button in the Productivity Pane

By default, the reference shape is the shape you selected first. You can change this to the shape you selected last in the presentaid settings under Shape Smart Alignment. Switch on Show Reference Shape flag to see a small REF flag on the reference shape whenever several shapes are selected.

Note: Master Alignment needs at least two selected shapes - with a single shape, Ctrl+click does nothing. Not sure which mode a button runs? Hover over it: the tooltip describes both. Master Alignment is also available in the ribbon: Smart Alignment group → Master Alignment.

Also Available in the Pane

You can open these presentaid features directly from the Productivity Pane:

Insert Chart: How to Insert a Chart
Gantt Chart: How to Work with Gantt Charts
Agenda Manager: How to Work with the Agenda Manager
Elements Library: How to Work with Elements
Style Painter (Shape section): Style Painter
Slide Radar: How to Work with Slide Radar
presentaid settings