Does Ppt have a function that precisely and mathematically divides shapes?
For example, suppose I created a square, using Insert Shape, and wanted it divided into sevenths. Is there some sort of Ppt formula function in which I can enter 7, thus causing index marks or something to appear on the square to indicate seven segments?
I am utterly itching to provide a response to this that would be so much more suited to IMHO than here. I shall restrain myself
Can you not use a table to acheive this (like us old-school HTML guys did in the bad old days)?
What do you need in that square? And dividing a square into 7 segments is an unusual problem. 6 or 8 would be easier. Unless you intend 7x7 = 49 segements.
Good question about tables; I didn’t think of that. Regarding the purpose of this, I was creating a scale for a floorplan of a new apartment. It shows the dimensions of the rooms (numerically
(eg 11’ x 13’)) and I want to derive a grid pattern, in one square foot intervals, that I can superimpose on the floorplan so that we can plan furniture placement etc.
The division into 7 was just for example purposes.
Sticking with your example of seven divisions:
Yes! I was trying to use that function but in another fashion and it wasn’t applicable to what I was trying to do. Your application makes perfect sense.
Glad to hear we’re on the right track. While you’re in that same sub-menu, note that the “Align top/middle/bottom and left/center/right” commands are similarly useful for getting things into nice clean rows, e.g. for getting all of those vertical lines on the same level and for justifying all those horizontal lines.
Honestly, I might just go to Excel for this and make sure the cells are the same width and height. THen either do my drawing there or cut/paste or screen capture the grid from Excel and drop it in powerpoint.
In retrospect that makes a lot of sense and never occurred to me when I was doing this.
You might also get some ideas from this guy, who shoes how to create a classic graph paper grid and then bury it in the master slide so that it shows up in the background on every slide and doesn’t get accidentally mutilated when you’re creating your drawing on top of it:
I thought I would never say this about powerpoint, one of my least favourite software, but that is pretty cool.
For the record, my least favourite software are, in decending order:
Excel
Powerpoint
MS Word
Outlook (though not 365)
MS Access
I use a Mac now - guess why…
Google sheets should get a mention as well, just for having an API. It’s not really Google’s fault how that can be abused, but trust me, I have seen abuse.
Because all those apps are available on the Mac too? 
I’m glad I got to the thread late enough that the OP explained their true goal.
A gotcha with doing grids, regardless of the app or technique: What you see on the screen and what you get on paper are two different sizes. And often two different aspect ratios.
If the idea is to use the computer to create a floor plan, then print it out and make paper cutouts of furniture to place here and there, you’ll have a bit of a process making them a consistent scale. If you’re really unlucky you’ll find that your couch needs to be a different size if it’s north-south or east-west in the room.
And if the idea is to do it all on-screen, then you definitely want the grid and walls in some sort of background layer with the furniture in a foreground layer. Otherwise you will drag a wall or a gridline while trying to move a couch and if you notice you’ll become frustrated and if you don’t notice you’ll become screwed.
The last time I had to do this task I went to the Office DepotMax and bought a pad of large graph paper. IIRC it was roughly 24x36 poster sized for use on a presentation easel, a hundred sheets, on a 1" grid, and not much money. I drew the plan on one sheet and cut up a couple other sheets with all my furniture peices and went to town. This seems to to be the closest analog to what I bought back then: Post it Super Sticky Easel Pad With 1 Grid Lines 25 x 30 White Pad Of 30 Sheets - Office Depot. Hint: “quadrille” is the printer’s term of art for what we call “graph paper”.
Sometimes a computer just makes everything harder.
If you’re serious about wanting to do this on the computer for whatever reason, you might want to look into a freeware CAD or furniture placement app. Good bet there are a bunch of those that might, net of their learning curve, make this a lot easier than fiddle-fucking around in PPT or Excel trying to create graph paper and a floor plan from tools designed for utterly different purposes.
Did this about a year ago. One fix in PowerPoint is to create all of the fixed features (walls, flooring, etc.) and then “group” them. That helped prevent me from accidentally moving those features when trying to move furniture (you might still accidentally move the entire floorplan as one entity, but that’s more easily undone). Had I thought it through more, yes, I would have embedded the floorplan in the master slide (as in the video I linked to) to make it completely untouchable while moving furniture around on top of it.
Never send PowerPoint to do Visio’s job.
(Although I admit I’d never pay my own money to license Visio. That crap is expensive.)
Well, I decided to redo my effort following Sigene’s suggestion. I made a grid using Excel, screen captured it, and sized it/calibrated it in Ppt against a known dimension and it was a far better outcome than my first effort.
Another tip that might be useful:
If you want to overlay your grid in front of other objects, the white back ground of the cells in your Excel grid will be a problem. After you’ve pasted your screen capture into PP:
All of the white pixels in your Excel grid will disappear. You won’t be able to select or manipulate other objects that are behind your grid, so moving your grid to the front would be something you do after you’re done getting everything else into position.