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The power of “Shift”
Don’t be lazy on your presentation — Article 2
How many times have you struggled to draw that line on a slide, I am talking about a perfectly straight line, or how about when you are drawing that circle, how many times have you had to resize the height or the width to get the perfect shape… if you are like me, probably a lot, so much that it gets infuriating.
What if I told you that with a single keystroke, you could get better control than you have ever had when creating elements on your slide. Don’t believe me, well read on my friend.
Honestly there is nothing worse than a hastily drawn line, that is either separating elements on a page, or connecting things together. I used to all sorts of tricks to get that perfect straight line. One trick I used was to draw a rectangle or box to the height or width of the line I wanted, and from there I would draw a line from anchor point to anchor point, after which I would delete the shape to be left with that perfect line.
Then of course if I had to make the line longer, quite often it would change one end of the point, and I would be looking at that single stroke again… “Is it straight?”
Well, there is one magical key that will give you complete control, that is the “SHIFT” key. Give it a try, I dare you…
Before you start to draw that line, hold down the shift key and start drawing your line. What you will find happens is that it locks the angle of the line at 45-degree increments. This makes it that much easier to get your perfectly straight line every time.
It wont matter if you try and force a different angle, it will snap to the next 45 degrees, and nothing in between. Once its drawn, you can of course reposition the line back as it was before, but if you wanted to make the line longer or shorter, without changing the angle, just hold down shift to do your resizing, and you won't lose the angle you set it at, and you won't……
