Today it's time to talk PowerPoint again, specifically about one
of the most useful tools to bring your slides to the next level, the Merge Shapes tool. Now don't think that this
video doesn't apply to you because you're presenting in
a professional environment and who cares about
shapes and merging them? This is the feature that's
going to take your PowerPoint presentations from good to great. I didn't know about this
feature for the longest time, when I discovered it, I was stunned how easy it easy
to create any shape you want in PowerPoint without having
to use specialized software like Adobe Illustrator. You can also use it to
fill your shapes or text with pictures to make them pop. Here's an example you might have seen it last night. (low tempo dramatic score) Before we jump in I just
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link in the description and get a two month free-trial. Now let's get back to the video. Let's assume you work at a
company that sells ice cream and you've been given a task
to create a great presentation. You get this image from
your marketing department and you're think about different
ways you can incorporate this in your presentation. Now what you don't want
to do is, just to put this is in a slide and use that. You actually want to
get creative with this. So what you're going to do
is to add different shapes, create your own custom shape out of that and use this as a background
image of that shape. Sounds complicated, it's
actually really easy. So first off, let's add a new blank slide and let's add in some shapes. So from here, first thing
I'm going to do is just add a circle, hold down the Shift key,
while I draw this out Now I'm going to copy
this but to make sure I'm on the same line,
I'm going to hold down the Ctrl and the Shift key and just drag this here. Now just hold down the
Ctrl and drag this up here. Let's add another shape, this time a triangle and just draw it out here
and turn this around. Now the great thing about using shapes is that you're free to
edit these as you like. So if you right mouse-click on a shape you have the ability to edit points. Now you can change these
points, as you want and create your own
custom shape out of this. Once you're done, select all of them but instead of grouping them
together, I'm going to go to Shape Format and merge them as Union. This creates one single free-form shape out of these four shapes. This way I can format it as I want. Now the way I actually want to format this is to add this image inside the shape. So I'm going to copy
this, bring the image here right mouse-click, send this to the back and let's just make it
a little bit smaller. To use this image, inside this shape fist select the mage, so
select whatever you want inside the shape and then hold down Ctrl and select a shape go back to Shape Format and this time, select Intersect. That puts the image you selected first inside the shape on top of the image. Notice here the gray areas,
that helps you understand what part of the image will be shown. Now what if this is not
the exact part of the image you wanted to show, you actually wanted that part with the chocolate ice cream. No problem, click on Picture
Format and then select Crop, this shows you the
entire background picture then you can adjust this as you like. So I'm going to go with this
one, click on Crop again and that's my new shape
filled with my picture. Now the great thing with
this feature is that you can also apply it to text. This way you can create really cool fonts for your presentation,
let me show you how. First off, let's add a
new blank slide to this. We need text, so let's insert a Text Box, there are different ways
you can insert this, you'll find it right here, you'll find it under Shapes here, you also find it on the Home
tab under Shapes as well. And let's just draw it out, I'm going to type in ice cream. Now for this to work
properly we need a big font and we're going to use this
as, let's say, our header. So I'm going to increase the size to 90 and I'm going to use another
type of font that's really thick. So if you just hover over these, you can see which ones work
well, like this one works well and if you just go down, all the way to R we have Rockwell, so
let's go with this one, that looks quite neat. Now, what we're going to do is
change this background black color into our picture. So I'm going to copy the picture, paste it here, let's send this to the back so right mouse-click, send to back and you can adjust it as you like. So we can make it a bit smaller. Now what I want to do is to also show you different merge options. So I'll just take a copy of
this before I apply Intersect to this one, because remember,
the moment you do that you actually will create a new shape. You lose the original shapes that you had, that's the major difference to grouping major shapes
together because when you group objects together you can move
them around as one object but you still have access
to the separate objects. When your merge shapes together, you actually create a new object. Now let's use Intersect on this one, so click on the background image first, click on your text, go to Shape Format, got to the Merge options here and select Intersect. You have created your own custom font. Now just like before, you
have the ability to use Crop and adjust where you want
your picture to appear. So I'm just going to go with
this and click on Crop again and that's my new font. So this is no longer
text that I can adjust, this is a picture, I can
save this as a picture and use it in my other files as well. Now let's quickly take a
look at the other options that we had, so first click
on the background image then click on the text,
go back to Shape Format and now this time, let's use Subtract. Subtract removes the shape
that's on top of the image, now again we end up with one single shape. Here's the coolest one of them all. Click on the image, click on your text, go to Shape format, select Fragment. Notice on the icon that
we have for Fragment, is slightly different to the other ones because we don't end up
with one single shape. Instead, we end up with different shapes, in this case, with a
lot of different shapes. So if I pull this away, this is one free-form
shape that was created and here I have a separate
shape for each letter. And for some letters, I have more because for the R here, I have
another piece right there. And because I have control of
every single part of the shape I could also animate and adjust these they way I need for my presentation. So these are the different
ways you can use Merge shapes to create more professional
and creative presentations. I hope you found this
PowerPoint tutorial helpful. Let me know in the comments
below, what you think and if there are any
specific PowerPoint topics that you'd like me to cover. Before you leave, don't
forget to subscribe in case you aren't subscribed already. I'm going to see you the next video. (low-tempo pleasant music)
