Reorder Shapes
If your PowerPoint slide has umpteen shapes or slide objects, you may find that some of these objects are hidden or overlapped. Or you probably do not know if there are any objects hidden behind the large shape or picture on your slide? How can you tackle this issue? It's easy to solve this problem if you know how to work with the Reorder options. These Reorder options allow you to bring forward any shape or slide object so that it stays right on top of all other objects. Similarly, you can send any shape or slide object behind everything else on your slide.

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Drawing a Perfect Circle
Drawing shapes is drop-dead easy with the vast repertoire of ready-made shapes available in PowerPoint 2013. You can easily insert these shapes with a click or two, but once in a while you may get stumped. One such scenario is when you need to draw a circle -- you'll find that PowerPoint's Shape gallery has no Circle shape! Don't worry -- all is not lost because there is an Oval shape and that can be used to draw a perfect circle.

Change Order of Chart Data Series
OK, so you want to change the order of your data series? Let's say your data series are Grapes, Apples, and Bananas -- and these show up in exactly the same order. Now, what if you want to change this order to Grapes, Bananas, and Apples? Yes, you could make these changes in the Excel sheet that contains the data for your PowerPoint chart -- but there must be an easier way? Indeed, there is -- read further to learn.

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Switch Series and Categories for Charts
Any typical chart inserted in PowerPoint contains two types of data -- one of these show as the Series within your charts, and the second data type ends up representing Categories. By default, the Series are shown as the individual chart elements -- for example as individual columns in a column chart. Also, the Series show up as the Legend for the chart. Categories on the other hand constitute the groups of these individual columns. If needed, you can quickly swap the visual representation of Series and Categories in the chart.

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Creating Charts Using Excel Data
Most of the time, you must start from scratch and then insert a new chart on your PowerPoint slide. This of course brings up Excel with some dummy data -- and indeed you can type in your own data to replace this dummy data. However, what if you already have some data that's within an Excel sheet -- why can't you use that data to create your PowerPoint chart? Why does PowerPoint in fact insist that you use the new Excel sheet and not any of your existing Excel sheets? And even if you must use that new Excel sheet, where does that sheet reside -- and can't you bring in your own data to that sheet in a way that does not make you type everything all over again? Wow -- that's a bunch of very genuine questions -- this article will attempt to provide you with some answers!