Drawing a line with three dots at each end in Powerpoint

Question

I am building a Powerpoint presentation about geometry. I want to draw a line with 3 dots at each end. Does anyone know of a simple way to do that? I am talking about as in the shapes that PowerPoint offers.

I have searched for solutions to that on StackExchange and on google, but found nothing on the matter.

Answer 1

You can insert a a background colored shape over the line ends. In the next image I have a group of three blue rectangles. Two copies of it are filled with white and placed on the line ends:

Use as small rectangles as you want. Or use circles; they need no rotation when placed on a tilted line.

If you combine the gap-making shapes and the line to a group, it can be moved, scaled and rotated freely:

Unfortunately to change the line color or width one must ungroup it. And even more unfortunately, one can move separately the line ends, no matter the line was a part of a group.

Another workaround is to draw two lines - one dotted which is picked from Powerpoint's line type collection and another shorter with solid line type.

ADD: Consider to draw complex compositions in Inkscape (=freeware). There you most easily get it by splitting the line and let the end segments have a dashed stroke. In addition you get very useful snapping modes and numerous other crutches to put together what you need. Recent versions of PPt import SVG files as vectors which stay editable in PPt. See this: https://blogs.articulate.com/rapid-elearning/edit-svg-graphics-powerpoint/ SVG is the native format of Inkscape.

ADD2: Animations in PPt are shape movements and changing scalings or visibilities. One inserts them to items after they are in PPt and converted to PPt shape format (=not automatic). Consider Inkscape as a $0,00 shop where you purchase vector items that are too tough to draw in PPt. There's no way to define the forthcoming Powerpoint animation already in Inkscape.

Answer 2

Here's a little VBA macro that will automatically add three dots to the beginning and end of a line. You may need to adjust the vertical positioning of the dots slightly to get them centered on the line.

Sub DotTheLine()
' Start with a HORIZONTAL line and make sure that the link and ONLY the
' line is selected.
' You can group the resulting shapes after running the macro and alter the
' line position/angle as desired

    Dim sngDotWidth As Single   ' width of dots
    Dim sngDotHeight As Single  ' height of dots (normally same as width)
    Dim sngOffset As Single     ' offset from line end to dots and dist between dots
    
    Dim oLine As Shape
    Dim oDot As Shape
    Dim oSl As Slide
    Dim x As Long
    
    ' Edit these as needed:
    sngDotWidth = 2     ' Points
    sngDotHeight = 2    ' Should be the same as sngDotWidth unless you want ovals
    sngOffset = 8       ' Distance between line and dots and between dots

    Set oLine = ActiveWindow.Selection.ShapeRange(1)
    Set oSl = oLine.Parent
    
    For x = 1 To 3  ' add 3 dots to right of line
    
        Set oDot = oSl.Shapes.AddShape(msoShapeOval, oLine.Left + oLine.Width + sngOffset * x, _
            oLine.Top, sngDotWidth, sngDotHeight)
            
        ' Copy formatting from line to dot
        oLine.PickUp
        oDot.Apply
    
    Next
    
    For x = 1 To 3  ' add 3 dots to left of line
    
        Set oDot = oSl.Shapes.AddShape(msoShapeOval, oLine.Left - (sngDotWidth + sngOffset * x), _
            oLine.Top, sngDotWidth, sngDotHeight)
            
        ' Copy formatting from line to dot
        oLine.PickUp
        oDot.Apply
    
    Next
    
End Sub