If you've ever had to do this before, you already know that PowerPoint's not going to give you much help.

Add-ins are small programs that attach themselves to PowerPoint and enhance it in various useful ways.THOR displays the shape's position and size coordinates (in points, PowerPoint's native units; 72 points to the inch). OK, for the last two examples, we memorized the slide's size before using THOR to demonstrate how you can fill a slide with an image or shape. Put a check next to Quiet mode if you'd rather not see these messages whenever you memorize a shape.

If you want to fill the slide with your image even if it distorts the proportions of the image, make sure there's no check next to Don't distort.

Of course, the result will depend on the options you've chosen, and there are a few little tips and tricks that might come in handy. That's normal; if you're not resizing shapes, there's no chance for them to get distorted, so the Don't distort option isn't relevant. You can customize THOR's buttons onto other ribbon tabs or even onto the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) so they're available all the time; no need keep popping back to the PPTools tab each time you want to whack something with The Hammer. Leave Don't distort checked to ensure that the image is enlarged to fill the slide as nearly as possible WITHOUT distortion.

PowerPoint will translate the number you enter to inches or cm, depending on your language settings. There's an extensive illustrated example of how each of the options settings works in the THOR Help file included with THOR or separately downloadable here. In the examples above, we only memorized the size/position of the gray Memorized Shape rectangle once, then changed THOR Options repeatedly to demonstrate how each of the settings affects THOR's behavior. Allow its buttons to be customized onto the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) or to any other tab in PowerPoint. Resize THOR can resize a shape to the memorized area or it can leave it at the current size and just re-position it to the memorized area.For example, imagine that you've placed a logo on one slide and want to add the same or different logos to other slides. All PPTools add-ins have free, fully functional demo versions you can download and install to test with before purchasing. Alignment When THOR resizes a shape, it can center it on the previously memorized area or it can align it to the upper left, lower left, upper right or lower right corner of the memorized area.

Don't distort When resizing a shape, THOR can maintain its aspect ratio (ie not distort it) or if you prefer, THOR can force the shape to the memorized area even if that will cause distortion. With PPTools, you can do more with PowerPoint and do it faster and more efficiently than you ever dreamed possible.If you need to use these same coordinates elsewhere, enter the number followed by "pt" to let PowerPoint know you want to use points as the unit of measure.