slide jiggle is the unexpected movement of elements on a slide as you flick through a presentation let's take a look this slide was created by Bane for UC Berkeley and as I flick through it keep an eye on the top left hand area of the slide now as you can see the content is jumping around everywhere that is slide jiggle it might sound trivial but it's really important that you eliminate slide jiggle from your presentations for two different reasons now the first reason is that it draws attention away from your content and makes it harder for the reader to follow your storyline because they're distracted by the slide jiggle and the second reason is that it gives the audience an impression that your presentation is rushed it's sloppy or it's poorly prepared and that's you know terrible as well so in this video I'm going to show you three different ways to address slide jiggle in your presentations let's jump into it the first way to address slide jiggle on your presentation is to use guides and grid lines now guides and grid lines are a PowerPoint functionality grid lines are repeated horizontal and vertical lines that are placed over your slide and as you can see this will place a grid on your slide that you can use to position elements accurately and consistently on your slides and if you do that on every slide there should be no slide jiggle as you flick through your presentation so it's really useful to use grid lines but I think there's something even more useful and that is guides now guides are similar to grid lines but guides will place a single vertical and a single horizontal line on your slide by default they appear along the center axis on your slide but you can actually drag them to any position on the slide Plus in addition to that you can add additional guides to your presentation so you can have multiple vertical guides multiple horizontal guides it's best practice to turn on Snap objects to grid and that'll ensure that any elements on your slide like text or shapes will snap automatically to guides and grid lines so that's really helpful and then once you've done that all you need to do is add any additional guides and then position them on your slide now what I typically do is I use three guides on each of my slides I'll have one on the left hand border one on the right hand border and one under the header as like kind of the top border for the slide body it looks something like this and once that's in place as I said as you add elements to your slide you can ensure that they snap directly to the guide and don't go over and that also means as you flick through the slides everything will be positioned perfectly now let's look at the second way to fix slide jiggle layouts there are two different ways to use layouts to eliminate slide jiggle from your presentations the first one is using the slide master and the second is using pre-built slide templates and let's look at both so starting with the slid Master uh if you don't know the PowerPoint slid Master allows you to create kind of a master layout that's reflected in all slides in your presentation it might look something like this this slide is a four boox table slide and we can set this slide up once as a slide master and whenever we want to put a four boox table in our presentation we can select the layout and just fill in the content the problem is if we want to edit this slide it can't really be done so say we want to add another row in if we try and edit the slide it actually won't let us do that because it's it's used using the slid Master then if we go into the slid master and edit the slide Master that's going to edit all the slides that are using this layout in our presentation so instead of using the slide Master we could use pre-built slide templates now the important thing is we need to ensure that we've created templates that are already formatted in a pixel perfect way uh we need to make sure all the elements are aligned properly but once that's done we can use those templates to create a slide presentation that has no slide jiggle so what a lot of people will do is they'll build presentations over time and they'll save down slides that they think are really good and they'll build up a repository or an archive of slides if you don't have the luxury or the time to build up your own repository of slide templates you can purchase one like my business strategy and Consulting template pack and all those slides are already designed to not have slide jiggle so I'll show you what I mean so I've pulled out a few slides from the template pack and as we flick through you can see that everything is positioned consistently across all the slides so the good thing about this template pack is that it doesn't overuse the slide master so it uses the slide Master for some things like the header the font the colors and that's very useful but it doesn't use it for the slide body so that means if you want to edit one of these slides you can edit it without affecting other slides in your presentation so it avoids the problem of using the slide Master uh completely but if you don't want to use slide templates there's another way that we can avoid slide jiggle and it's kind of old school and it's called the copy and paste method so as I mentioned the copy and paste method is kind of old school it's kind of manual but it works and I'll show you how so you might already know that if you copy an element and paste it on the same slide it's offset slightly so this is what I mean so if I copy this box and I hit paste you can see that the new box is a little bit lower and a little bit to the right of the original so that's not a good thing for slide jigle because they're not aligned in the same position however if you copy and paste from one slide to another it doesn't offset so it'll paste in the exact same position as the original slide so because of that you can build slides by copy and pasting elements out of other slides and let me show you what I mean so I'm going to take the left hand column from this slide and paste it in our new slide and then I'm going to take this uh Aug chart from this slide and paste it on the right hand side and as you can see it's pasted in in the exact same position as the previous slides so if I flick from this slide to the original you can see that there's no slide jiggle so you can avoid slide jiggle by copying elements from one slide and pasting them to another because it doesn't offset the elements it only offsets the elements if you're pasting on the same slide so that's three ways to eliminate slide jiggle in your presentations and if you're curious about any of the slides that you saw in this video they're all from the business strategy and Consulting template pack and I'll put a link in the description below