How to create a vertical powerpoint slide

How To Create a Vertical PowerPoint Slide (Portrait Layout)

If you’ve ever wanted to make your PowerPoint slides feel more like a poster, flyer, or even an Instagram Story, you’re not alone. Vertical PowerPoint slides (also called portrait slides) are ideal for one-pagers, print-ready materials, mobile-friendly presentations, and social content.

This guide shows you how to set up or switch to a vertical layout in PowerPoint.

Why Use a Vertical PowerPoint Slide?

Before jumping into how to do it, here’s why a portrait slide layout might be the perfect choice for you:

  • Ideal for printed PDFs (for example, flyers and reports)
  • Mobile-first presentations for vertical screen viewing
  • Infographics that need a lot of vertical space
  • Digital signage or graphics for kiosks on vertical monitors

How To Change PowerPoint to Vertical Slide Layout

Here’s how to switch your slides from landscape to portrait orientation in PowerPoint:

  1. Open your PowerPoint presentation.
  2. Go to the Design tab on the ribbon.
  3. Click on Slide Size (upper right corner), then choose Custom Slide Size.
  4. In the pop-up window, change the orientation to Portrait under “Slides.”
  5. Click OK.

You’ll now get a prompt asking:

“Maximize” or “Ensure Fit”?
  • Maximize: Your current content stays large and may get cut off.
  • Ensure Fit: PowerPoint will shrink your content to fit the new slide size.

✅ Tip: If you're starting from scratch, either is fine. But if you've already built out slides, choose "Ensure Fit" to avoid layout issues.

Examples of Vertical PowerPoint Slide Layouts

Vertical slides require different layout thinking than landscape ones. Here are a few layout examples that work especially well in portrait orientation:

1. Infographic-Style Slide
Perfect For: timelines, flows, graphics that need lots of vertical space

(Credit: Adobe stock)
2. Vertical One Pager
Perfect For: One-pagers, printed PDFs
(Credit: Adobe stock)

3. Mobile-Friendly Social Layouts
Perfect For: Sharing posts, ads and insights on mobile platforms
(Credit: Adobe stock)

Final Thoughts

Creating a vertical PowerPoint presentation is easy when your content is better suited to a tall format. Whether you’re crafting a vertical infographic, a printable handout, or mobile content, you'll now be able to flex your slide's format to be vertical, square, and anything in between.
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