Merge and Split Table Cells
Add a table to your PowerPoint slide and then populate the table with content -- and then what comes next? Probably you need to add or remove rows and columns. That's the case with most people who work with tables. But very few people realize that the table cells can be made larger or smaller without influencing the entire row or column -- and that's something that can be easily achieved by merging or splitting cells in your existing table. This is essentially true for tables that have two header rows, or even with tables that have a long phrase in the header row.

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Table Options
Create a new table in PowerPoint and you'll find that it already includes some sort of default formatting -- more often than not, you'll find that the table already has Banded rows and the Header row highlighted. While PowerPoint decides to turn on some of these Table Options, there are some that you must manually enable. All put together, you can play with 6 distinct options that let you control the way through which table elements can be made to stand apart. You can find these options within a group called Table Options.

Shape Combine
There are so many shapes available within PowerPoint 2013 -- and that's good because that means so many more possibilities to create your own unique shapes by using any of the Merge Shapes commands. One of the amazing options within Merge Shapes is Combine -- this retains areas where the shapes do not overlap while removes overlapping areas -- think of Combine as an amazing cutout option! The resultant shapes result in a cutout, remnant shape.

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Shape Fragment
PowerPoint 2013 provides so many new features, but one of them is essentially such a small addition that you may completely miss exploring it. And that would be sad because this feature can open up so many possibilities. We have already explored the Merge Shape commands -- while 4 of the 5 commands within this category have been available since PowerPoint 2010, the Fragment command is new for this version. Unlike other Merge Shape commands that retain or remove overlapping and non-overlapping areas of multiple shapes, the Fragment option discards nothing at all. In fact, it "fragments" each possible division caused by overlapping shapes and turns them into many, smaller shapes.

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Shape Intersect
PowerPoint 2013 lets you take a bunch of selected shapes and then apply one of the five Merge Shapes options to end up with some amazing results. However, the Intersect option that we are exploring within this tutorial works a little differently than the Combine, Fragment, Subtract, or Union options that we explore in other tutorials. The Intersect command works only when all selected shapes overlap each other. If any shapes do not overlap, Shape Intersect causes complete deletion of all shapes.