A shape menu offers well over a hundred shapes, and almost all of them are decoration with a name. Take a census of the audited deck: 486 objects across 42 slides, of which 168 are rectangles, 92 are text boxes, 74 are lines or connectors, 61 are rounded rectangles, 31 are chevrons or block arrows, and 22 are ovals. Those six types account for 448 objects, which is 92.18% of everything on the file. The other 38 objects, at 7.82%, are the stars, the banners, the speech bubbles and the bevelled cubes somebody added on an afternoon when the slide looked thin.
Verify (checked 2026-09-08): the exact count in the shape gallery varies by release and platform, so treat the hundred as an order of magnitude rather than a figure.
What does each of the six shapes do?
| shape | what it asserts | the job it does |
|---|---|---|
| Rectangle | a bounded thing, with no claim about its nature | containers, panels, table cells built by hand, bars |
| Rounded rectangle | the same, softened, usually to mark a different class of object | steps, cards, callouts, anything that should read as a unit |
| Line or connector | a relationship between two things | flows, dependencies, timelines, rules and separators |
| Text box | words that are not in a placeholder | labels, annotations, source lines, callouts |
| Oval | a thing outside the main flow, or a point | start and end nodes, markers, emphasis rings |
| Chevron or block arrow | direction, sequence or transfer | process steps, flows between stages |
The other shapes aren't forbidden. What you need to know is that a shape carries an assertion, and a reader decodes it whether or not you meant one. Six rounded rectangles in a row say these are six things of the same kind. Five chevrons say these happen in this order. A rectangle and an oval side by side say these two things are different in kind, and if they are not, the reader has been told something false in a language they read faster than they read your text.
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What two habits keep a deck's shapes consistent?
Two habits make the six enough. First, a shape's meaning has to stay stable within a deck. If a rounded rectangle is a process step on slide 4, it isn't a data callout on slide 11. Second, when two shapes differ, the difference should carry information. Variety for its own sake tells the reader nothing. When you catch yourself reaching for a seventh shape, ask what distinction you're trying to draw. Usually you can draw it with the six you have plus a fill, a stroke or a position.
There's one exception worth naming: the shape that's a picture of a real object. A pipe, a building, a truck or a screen drawn as an icon is a different thing from a rectangle. Its consistency rules are different too, so it belongs with icons.