Add connection points to a shape without changing the shape

Question

Hi,

How can I add additional connection points to a shape without distorting the shape?

I right click a shape and select 'Edit Points'. Then I can ctrl + click to add a new connection point to the border of the shape. But when I add a second point the border gets distorted. I need to add several new points so the shape becomes very distorted. Below how it looks after adding the second point. 

Many thanks

Answer 1

Hi, MD999!

I'm Katha, an Independent Advisor and a Microsoft Office user like you. It's my pleasure to help you out with your concern.

I have tried this on my end and have noticed that shapes with straight lines don't get distorted as much compared to the shapes with curves. It seems that the edit points feature in Powerpoint is very sensitive that it follows even the slightest movement of your mouse. So if you click on a point and your cursor is not that steady, it tends to follow the direction of wherever your cursor has moved.

I don't think there is a straightforward way to add additional connection points without making changes/distorting the original shape. May I ask what kind of shape you want to achieve by editing the points? Maybe I can help you look for a way to create that certain shape.

In the meantime, here are some tips that I can share that will help you achieve more control when editing the shapes in Powerpoint:

• To have the point treated as a smooth point, press SHIFT while dragging

either of the handles attached to the point. Once you stop dragging, the point

will be changed to a smooth point.

• To have the point treated as a straight point, press CTRL while dragging either of the handles attached to the point. Once you stop dragging, the point

will be changed to a straight point.

• To have the point treated as a corner point, press ALT while dragging either

of the handles attached to the point. Once you stop dragging, the point

will be changed to a corner point.

• To cancel the change to the point and line segments, press ESC before releasing the mouse button.

Note: To make it easier to draw details, increase the magnification to 200% or higher. This will give you more control over the shape that you want to achieve.

Please let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with.

Regards,

Katha

Answer 2

Many thanks for your kind help Katha, however I'm still not able to add the points without making a mess of the shape. I need to do this to create various shape templates to include in circuit diagrams. The idea is to have connectors at several specific places in the templates to allow for lines to be easily added to the correct places. But maybe there is some better way of achieving this. The image below shows an example of what I'm trying to achieve. The shape is a regular rectangle with an image as background. I have then added circles to show how additional connection points should be added to allow the user to add lines to selected points.

Answer 3

PowerPoint's drawing tools just aren't that good. Usually to add an edit point, the mouse must be slightly in motion, which automatically distorts the shape. The best you can do is move the mouse along the side being edited instead of perpendicular to it.

This is much easier to do in a dedicated drawing program like Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw or the free InkScape program. Draw a rectangle and add points to the sides. None of these programs distort shapes when you edit them. Then export to EMF, import to PowerPoint and ungroup twice to turn the shape into a native Office drawing object.

Answer 4

One trick that might work for you:

Duplicate the original shape, add your extra points to it and ignore the extra bumps, lumps and humps that result.

Move the duplicate shape exactly atop the original, assign the dupe no fill, no outline, then group the two shapes.

The new points will work as connection points; it can be a bit fiddly to get the correct shape within the group to "light up" but it's do-able.

Answer 5

Thanks to all! Inkscape worked great - below some details of how I did - never used Inkscape before but the below steps worked for me and gave me perfect shapes in Powerpoint with any connections point I wanted :)