Video information:
Learn how to use some of Grunt Tools' great features. This video teaches you:
- distributing shapes using Grunt's special Distribute feature
- using Grunt's special Swap and Select Similar features
- set margins for many shapes at once
- setting default shape resizing based on text flow
- quickly add a comment to your slide
- quickly update the proofing language for your entire presentation
Welcome to this Grunt tutorial. In this video, I'll show you how Grunt Tools can help you become more productive. We'll look at a set of quick tools that improve your workflow. Let's get started.
Distribute lets you equalize the spacing between shapes, either horizontally or vertically. I select a range of shapes and press Distribute horizontally. The leftmost shape and the rightmost shape stay in place, while the other shapes move to obtain equal horizontal spacing between them,
Sometimes you want to distribute your shapes to the slide. You can do this in Grunt while holding the Ctrl while pressing the Distribute button. Grunt will find the shape that is closest to the edge of the slide and move the other shapes into place. After the operation, you'll end up with equal spacing on each side of the shape range and equal spacing between the shapes in the range. Getting this symmetry quickly is difficult with native PowerPoint
Swap shapes lets you swap the positions of two selected shapes, like this. It's great for those quick adjustments to your layout.
The Select Similar feature lets you select more shapes based on traits like Size, Shape type, Color and Outline. Here's an example where I select all shapes with the same color as the selected shape. If I wanted to select all the shapes of this type regardless of color, I could use this button instead, which lets me select shapes by the same type.
Grunt lets you update margins for multiple shapes at once. I select a range of shapes and head over to the margin function. Here I can either choose from a preset, or specify my margins manually. If I choose a preset, the margins for all the shapes will be harmonized instantly. If I undo, and rather choose to set the margins manually, I get much more fine-grained control of what the margins should be.
The Fit shape to text feature lets you control how you shape size is affected by the text within it. There are three different options, and I'll show you each of them in turn. For the first shape I'll choose Fixed size. As I type text into the shape the shape size will never change. For the second shape, I'll chooseFit to text horizontally. The shape will immediately contract to the width of the text, and as I type more text into the shape, it'll widen to fit the text. For the third shape, I'll choose Fit to text vertically. The shape will immediately contract to the height of the text, and as I type more text, it'll wrap and increase the size of the shape.
Clear text simply removes all the text in your selected shapes. It's a nice way to quickly clean up your slide if you're starting out from an old template.
You can quickly add a comment to your document by pressing the Insert sticky note button. Notice that you can start typing directly, and that Grunt marks the comment with your credentials automatically.
If you're working with slides from templates that were made in different languages, you've probably experienced that spelling can jump from language to language in the presentation. The Set language feature lets you harmonize the language across all the shapes and text boxes in your entire presentation and updates the default language in a single click.