Most misaligned slides are not the work of one careless person. They are the residue of many small edits: a slide copied from last year's pitch, a chart pasted from Excel, a logo dragged in from an email signature. Each move is harmless. Together they leave a title sitting a few pixels off centre and a row of boxes that are almost, but not quite, evenly spaced.
The usual response is to nudge. Arrow key, squint, arrow key again, zoom in, zoom out. It feels productive and rarely is, because the eye is a poor judge of a two-pixel gap.
Stop nudging.
PowerPoint already has the tools to fix this properly. Select the shapes, open Arrange, and use Align and Distribute rather than your judgement. Align snaps a set of objects to a shared edge or centre line. Distribute spreads them so the gaps between them are identical. Smart guides, which you can switch on under View, show you when an object lines up with its neighbours as you drag it.
The catch is that these commands sit a few menus deep, so people reach for the arrow keys instead. That is the case for putting alignment and distribution one click away on a toolbar, which is how tlbr.io approaches it for the firms it builds for.
Try this on your next deck: pick the busiest slide, select every shape on it, and run Align Top followed by Distribute Horizontally. Then compare it with the version you nudged by hand.
