PowerPoint remains one of the most who powerful presentation tools in circulation and is extremely popular, allowing users to create customizable slideshows. While the application continues to be very popular and very useful, it can be improved via various add-ins, OfficeOne CircleTools is one of those add-ins. OfficeOne CircleTools provides users with a quick and simple way to create circular shapes out of the existing, insertable PowerPoint shapes.

With some add-ins, finding the newly added option can be difficult and confusing, often causing users to spend an excessive amount of time hunting it down. OfficeOne CircleTools's icon is clearly inserted into the Design Tools area of the PowerPoint Ribbon, or menu depending on your version of PowerPoint.

While the button is easily located, there would be a vast improvement if it was added to the contextual menu that users see when they right click on a shape. Since the button is only usable when a shape is selected, it would save a significant amount of time to just click a shape.

When users select a shape and begin creating a circle out of it, the application provides various settings to customize the result. Users can change the number of shapes used, the diameter of the circle, as well as the rotation of the shapes to form a circle.

Unfortunately, the position of where the circle is going to appear is completely uneditable and tends to just plant itself in the middle of the slide. Though, the biggest problem by far is the inability to select all the shapes as a single shape. To move the circle requires each individual shape to be moved, which is not only difficult to recreate and extremely tedious. A bigger issue with the lack of the circle being counted as a single shape is that animations and effects cannot be applied to the circle as a whole, which undermines the value of the application immensely.

Given that OfficeOne CircleTools is not a free application, it needs to be worth the money. Unfortunately, the shape lacking compatibility with PowerPoint is a new, complete shape, rather than just a pattern of individual shapes ruins its potential. Effects and animations cannot be applied to it as a whole, nor can it be moved as a whole, rending Iit extremely limited and not worth the time.