Drag & Drop Freeform shape positioning in Drop Correct State.

I’m having a problem positioning shapes (text boxes) in various states. The issue is illustrated in the attached slide.  When a statement ending is dropped onto the correct statement, it should locate to the end of the statement (with the ellipses overlapping) and the text color is changed.  Except for the Truth In Negotiations Act ending, the process seems to work.  But if you look at the states of the endings, you will note that for the Drop Correct state, I had to position the text boxes in odd locations to get them to line up close to where they belong when the state is called for.  This makes precise positioning very tedious, at best. For the TINA ending, I positioned the text box for the Drop Correct state in the position in which it should appear on the slide, but as you can see, it positions itself well off to the upper left when dropped on the target. The positions the shapes go to are relative to the center of the target shape, and by knowing the offset it is possible to make it work, but it’s not a good solution.

I believe I’ve changed some setting that is making this happen.  When I first started working on this slide, things seemed to work properly.  I created the shapes to be dragged and their matching targets, filled them with text, converted to freeform, then created the Drop Correct states for each.  For the new Drop Correct state, I changed the font color and location of the text box by simply dragging the shape into the correct position, using the keyboard arrows for precise positioning/alignment.  Ran the Preview and it worked fine…. Until it didn’t.  I’m definitely still learning, and am pretty regularly trying out different features and settings, and I think I was experimenting with different drop target options when my shapes were suddenly out of their positions.

In studying how the settings appear in the Size and Positioning settings window it seems that the position of shapes on the main layer are relative to top left of the slide, but the position of the same shapes in the other States are referenced from the top left corner of the shape.  With these two coordinate systems out of sync it is difficult to get the shapes where you need them to be.

I think this is what they call a rabbit hole….. :-)

What have I done and how do I fix it?

Thanks.

Tom