Imagine you have a few images and shapes stacked on a PowerPoint slide. You want to change the stacking order and give the slide a more pleasing appearance and a more creative option for a better PowerPoint presentation. It's troublesome, like shuffling a deck of cards.

There are two ways PowerPoint 2016 for Mac can help you out here:

  • Use the Bring Forward and Send Backward tools to change the order.
  • Use the Dynamic Reordering command to manage the stacking order visually.

The Bring Forward and Send Backward functions have been long-standing features for graphic re-arrangement in PowerPoint, but Dynamic Reordering is new -- and it gives you a better "preview" of the pictures and graphic elements that overlap on the slide.

How to Use Dynamic Reordering

Think of each graphic object on your slide as a sheet of clear plastic. Now, you would arrange them in the real world by shuffling them on top or behind each other. Dynamic Reordering works just like that. Take this slide for example:

You don't like the arrangement and would like to tweak the order in which they appear on the slide. You don't have to select each individual object and send them backward or forward. Dynamic Reordering makes it a lot faster:

  1. Fom the Home tab, click Arrange. Then click Reorder Objects.
  2. A three-dimensional display now shows you how all the slide's graphic objects are layered.
  3. As you bring your pointer to each layer, a number (or order number) appears. Drag the layers into the order you want.
  4. When you have the order you want, click OK to return to normal view. Now you can see that the objects are placed as you moved them.

Dynamic Reordering is unique to PowerPoint 2016 for Mac and it gives you an easy visual way to distribute overlapping objects just right. Windows users will have to wait and see if Microsoft ever brings this nifty feature across operating systems.

Is Dynamic Reordering a time saver? Will it add to a more creative presentation?