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Countries, regions, economic blocs and administrative subdivisions come in as native editable freeform region shapes, grouped together on the slide. Each district, state or département is its own shape, so you can:
  • recolour a single region without touching its neighbours,
  • shade a set of regions by a metric and build a real legend from them,
  • delete, nudge or relabel one region,
  • hand the deck to someone who has never used Pretty and let them edit it in plain PowerPoint.

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Finding a map

Open the Assets tab and pick Maps. The library opens on regions; drill into one, or type into Search maps….
Maps library showing Global, Europe, Germany and Asia regions with preset counts and outline previews

The library opens on regions, each with the number of presets inside it.

Each result carries a short description and roughly how many regions it contains, which is usually the fastest way to tell two similar presets apart. You can also just ask in chat. The agent runs a Find map step, ranks the presets and inserts the one that fits your slide. The shapes it places are the same editable freeforms.

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Map settings

Open Map settings from the picker header. The panel is titled Map defaults (“Applied to every map you insert”), so what you set here carries to the next map, and the one after that.
Map settings panel with sliders for label size, city dot size and line thickness, and pickers for labels, connect by, legend position and line style

Map defaults: label and dot size, where labels sit, and how a legend ties back to the map.

Labels decides whether city names sit next to their dots (On the map) or collect into a list beside them (In a legend). Connect by ties a legend row back to its dot with a Number or a Line. Line style and Line thickness only appear when leader lines can be drawn: when Labels is On the map (where a label pushed off its dot gets a leader), or when Connect by is set to Lines.
Open the same panel from inside a map you are configuring and it reads “Only this map — your defaults stay unchanged”. Use that when one slide needs a bigger legend than the rest of the deck.

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Choose cities

Picking a map opens the Choose cities step before anything lands on the slide.
1

Search

Type into Search cities.... Each row shows the city, its country and its population, so you can tell one Springfield from the other.
2

Select

Tick as many as you need. The header keeps a running count, and the list loads more as you scroll.
3

Insert

The button reads Insert ({{count}}) with the number you have ticked. Insert with none selected to get the region shapes on their own.

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Recipes

Insert the admin-level map for the country (germany states, us states) with no cities. Then click a region and set its fill. Because every region is a separate shape, a five-step colour scale is five fills, and the legend is five rectangles with the same fills. Or ask the agent to do it in one go: “shade the states by the revenue in this table, darkest for the highest”.
Set Labels to In a legend, Connect by to Numbers, and Legend position to Right. Then pick your offices in Choose cities. Each dot gets a number and the legend lists them in order, which keeps a crowded map readable where on-map labels cannot.
Leave Labels on On the map, keep City dot size small, and pick three or four cities. Where a label would collide with its dot, a leader line appears. Set Line style to Right angle for a technical look, Straight for a lighter one.
Search the bloc directly (european union, nato) rather than assembling countries by hand. Then recolour the two or three member states you are actually talking about and leave the rest in a muted theme tone.

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Editing after insertion

Everything is a normal PowerPoint shape, so the usual tools apply: select a region, set a fill, add an outline, send it behind a callout. For anything fiddlier, select the shapes and describe the change in chat. The agent picks up what you have selected and edits those shapes.
Maps are wide. Insert one before you write the surrounding copy, so the text block is sized to the space that is actually left.