PowerPoint 2016 For Dummies (2016)

Part II

Creating Great-Looking Slides

See how to add recurring text or other elements to each of your PowerPoint slides at www.dummies.com/extras/powerpoint2016.

In this part …

Find out how to stun your audience and receive ooohs and aaahs from the crowd by formatting text and giving your slides a spectacular appearance.

Get familiar with PowerPoint themes that allow you to create good-looking slides in minutes.

Explore how to use slide transitions and animations to make even the dullest content look amazing.

Discover how to utilize Masters, the surefire way to add something to every slide.

Chapter 7

All about Fonts and Text Formatting

In This Chapter

Using bold, italics, underlining, and other character effects

Changing the text font, size, and color

Using bullets and numbers

Tabbing and indenting

Spacing out lines of text

Aligning text

Making fanciful text with the WordArt feature

Agood presentation is like a fireworks show: At every new slide, the audience gasps, “O-o-o-h. A-a-a-h.” The audience is so stunned by the spectacular appearance of your slides that no one really bothers to read them.

This chapter gets you on the road toward ooohs and aaahs by showing you how to format text. If you use PowerPoint templates as the basis for your presentations, your text is already formatted acceptably. To really pull out the pyrotechnic stops, however, you have to know a few basic formatting tricks.

Many PowerPoint text-formatting capabilities work the same as in Microsoft Word. If you want to format text a certain way and you know how to do it in Word, try formatting the same way in PowerPoint. Odds are good that it works.

Changing the Look of Your Text

The theme that’s applied to your presentation determines the basic look of the presentation’s text. However, you’ll often want to change that look, sometimes subtly and sometimes dramatically.

You can control the most commonly used font settings by using the Font group in the Home tab on the Ribbon, as shown in Figure 7-1.

Figure 7-1: The Font group on the Home tab on the Ribbon.

If the Font group in the Home tab doesn’t provide enough options for formatting your text, you can call up the Font dialog box for additional options. To summon this dialog box, just select the dialog launcher for the Font group. (The dialog launcher is the cursor at the bottom-right corner of the group.) Figure 7-2 shows this dialog box.

Figure 7-2: The Font dialog box.

Many font formatting options also have handy keyboard shortcuts. Table 7-1 lists the formatting commands along with their Ribbon buttons and equivalent keyboard shortcuts.

Table 7-1 Character-Formatting Commands

It’s true — PowerPoint has many keyboard shortcuts for character formatting. You don’t have to know them all, though. The only ones I know and use routinely are the shortcuts for bold, italic, underline, and clear all formatting. Study these and you’ll be in good shape. You get the added bonus that these keyboard shortcuts are the same as the shortcuts that many other Windows programs use. If you’re mouse-happy and keyboard-annoyed, click away for goodness’ sake. What matters most is that you can easily find and use what you need.

Two ways to apply formatting

You can format text in two basic ways:

· To format existing text, highlight the text that you want to format. Then, click the toolbar button or use the keyboard shortcut for the format that you want. For example, to make existing text bold, highlight it and then click the Bold button or press Ctrl+B.

· To type new text using a fancy format, click the toolbar button or use the keyboard shortcut for the format. Then, type away. The text that you type is given the format you selected. To return to normal formatting, click the button or use the keyboard shortcut again. Or press Ctrl+spacebar.

Changing the size of characters

Whether text is difficult to read or you simply want to draw attention to it, you can make part of the text bigger than the surrounding text. The easiest way to change the size of your text is to use the Font Size drop-down list that appears next to the font name in the Font group on the Home tab. Just choose among the sizes that appear in the Font Size drop-down list or click in the Font Size box and type whatever size you want to use.

You can also change the size of your text by using the Increase Font Size or Decrease Font Size buttons, or by using the Ctrl+Shift+> or Ctrl+Shift+< keyboard shortcuts. These commands increase or decrease the font size in steps, respectively.

If you type more text than will fit in a text placeholder, PowerPoint will automatically make your text smaller so that the text will fit within the placeholder.

Choosing text fonts

If you don’t like the looks of a text font, you can switch easily to a different font. To change the font for existing text, select the text. Then click the arrow next to the Font control (found in the Font group of the Home tab) and choose the font that you want to use. If you’re allergic to the mouse, you can get to the font list by pressing Ctrl+Shift+F. Then you can use the up- or down-arrow keys to choose the font you want to use.

Here are additional points to ponder concerning fonts:

· Although you can change the font from the Font dialog box, the Font control on the Ribbon has one major advantage over the Font dialog box: It displays each of your fonts by using the font itself, so you can see what each font looks like before you apply it to your text. In contrast, the Font dialog box displays the name of each font by using the standard Windows system font.

· If you want to change the font for all the slides in your presentation, switch to Slide Master View and then change the font. Details on how to do so are covered in Chapter 10.

· PowerPoint automatically moves the fonts that you use the most to the head of the font list. This feature makes picking your favorite font even easier.

· Don’t overdo it with fonts! Just because you have many different font choices doesn’t mean that you should try to use them all on the same slide. Don’t mix more than two or three typefaces on a slide, and use fonts consistently throughout the presentation.

· If you want to set a font that is used consistently throughout a presentation, the best way to do so is to set the font for the presentation’s theme. For more information, see Chapter 8.

Adding color to your text

Color is an excellent way to draw attention to text in a slide. To change text color, first select the text whose color you want to change. Then click the Font Color button and choose the color that you want to use from the color menu that appears.

If you don’t like any color that the Font Color button offers, click More Colors. A bigger dialog box with more color choices appears. If you still can’t find the right shade of teal, click the Custom tab and have at it. Check out Chapters 8 and 9 if you need further help with colors.

If you want to change the text color for your entire presentation, do so in the Slide Master View (see Chapter 10 for details). And you can refer to Chapter 8 for information about changing font colors by using the theme.

Adding shadows

Adding a shadow behind your text can make the text stand out against its background, which makes the entire slide easier to read. For that reason, many of the templates supplied with PowerPoint use shadows.

You can apply a shadow to any text by first selecting the text and then clicking the Text Shadow button, found in the Font section of the Home tab. If you want all the text on a slide to be shadowed, however, you should use the Slide Master View to create the shadow format. For more information, peek ahead to Chapter 10.

Big Picture Text Formatting

The Paragraph group on the Home tab on the Ribbon, as shown in Figure 7-3, has several buttons that apply formats to entire paragraphs. The following sections describe the most common uses for the buttons in this group.

Figure 7-3: The Paragraph group on the Home tab on the Ribbon.

Biting the bulleted list

Most presentations have at least some slides that include a bulleted list, which is a series of paragraphs accented by special characters lovingly known as bullets. In the old days, you had to add bullets one at a time. Nowadays, PowerPoint comes with a semi-automatic bullet shooter that is illegal in 27 states.

PowerPoint lets you create fancy bullets that are based on bitmap pictures rather than simple dots and check marks. Before you go crazy with picture bullets, take a look at the basic way to bite the bullet.

To add bullets to a paragraph or series of paragraphs, take aim and fire, like so:

1. Highlight the paragraphs to which you want to add bullets.

To add a bullet to just one paragraph, you don’t have to highlight the entire paragraph. Just place the cursor anywhere in the paragraph.

2. Click the Bullets button found in the Paragraph group of the Home tab.

PowerPoint adds a bullet to each paragraph that you select.

The Bullets button works like a toggle: Press it once to add bullets and press it again to remove bullets. To remove bullets from previously bulleted text, therefore, you select the text and click the Bullets button again.

If you don’t like the appearance of the bullets that PowerPoint uses, you can select a different bullet character, picture, or even a motion clip by clicking the down arrow at the right side of the Bullets button. This action reveals a list of choices for various types of bullets.

If none of the bullets in this list are acceptable, you can bring up the Bullets and Numbering dialog box by clicking the arrow at the right of the Bullets button and then choosing Bullets and Numbers. This step summons the Bullets and Numbering dialog box, as shown in Figure 7-4. From this dialog box, you can choose a different bullet character, change the bullet’s color, or change its size relative to the text size.

Figure 7-4: The Bullets and Numbering dialog box.

The following paragraphs point out some important tidbits to keep in mind when you use bullets:

· Customize bullet characters: You can choose from among several collections of bullet characters that are available. If you don’t like any of the bullet characters displayed for you in the dialog box, click Customize in the lower-right corner of the dialog box. This brings up a dialog box that lists a variety of useful alternative bullet characters, such as pointing fingers, a skull and crossbones, and a time bomb. Pick the bullet that you want to use and then click OK. If you can’t find a bullet that suits your fancy, choose a different font in the Font control drop-down list.

· Change the size of bullet characters: If the bullet characters don’t seem large enough, increase the size in the Bullets and Numbering dialog box. The size is specified as a percentage of the text size.

· Change the color of bullet characters: To change the bullet color, use the Color drop-down list to choose the color that you want to use. Colors from the current color scheme appear in the drop-down menu that appears. For additional color choices, choose More Colors to call up a dialog box that offers a complete range of color choices. (For more information about using colors, see Chapter 8.)

· Use images for your bullet characters: To use a picture bullet, click the Picture button located in the lower right of the Bullets and Numbering dialog box. This click brings up the dialog box shown in Figure 7-5, which lets you choose from several sources for a picture to use as a bullet.

Figure 7-5: Using a picture bullet.

Creating numbered lists

If you want your slide to include a numbered list, use the Numbering button, which appears next to the Bullets button on the Home tab. When you click the Numbering button, PowerPoint adds simple numbers to the selected paragraphs.

If you want to change the numbering format, click the arrow next to the Numbering button to display a list of number style choices. Then you can select the style that suits your fancy.

If none of the styles in the list are right, choose Bullets and Numbering to reveal the numbering options shown on the Numbered tab of the Bullets and Numbering dialog box. See Figure 7-6.

Figure 7-6: More ways to format numbers.

Normally, the starting number for each list reverts to 1 for each new slide. What if you have a list that has more items than can fit on one slide, such as a David Letterman-style Top Ten list? In that case, you can type the first half of the list on one slide and then type the second half of the list on a second slide. Next, right-click the first item on the second slide and choose Bullets and Numbering from the menu that appears. Then, change the Start At value to the number at which you want the second part of the list to begin. For example, if the first slide has five numbered items, change the Start At value for the first item on the second slide to 6.

Setting tabs and indents

PowerPoint enables you to set tab stops to control the placement of text within a text object. For most presentations, you don’t have to fuss with tabs. Each paragraph is indented according to its level in the outline, and the template that you use to create the presentation presets the amount of indentation for each outline level.

If you’re stubborn about tabs, you can mess with the indent settings and tab stops — that is, if you’re adventurous and have no real work to do today. Here’s how you do it:

1. Click the Slide button to switch to Normal View.

You can’t mess with tabs or indents in Notes Page View or Slide Sorter View.

2. If the rulers aren’t visible, summon them by clicking the View tab on the Ribbon and then selecting the Ruler check box in the Show/Hide group.

Rulers appear above and to the left of the presentation window and show the current tab and indentation settings.

3. Select the text object whose tabs or indents you want to change.

Each text object has its own tabs and indents settings. After you click a text object, the ruler shows that object’s tabs and indents.

4. Click the ruler to add a tab stop.

Move the cursor to the ruler location where you want to add a tab stop and then click. A tab stop appears.

5. Grab the indentation doohickey and then drag it to change the indentation.

The indentation doohickey (that’s not its official name) is the control that looks like an hourglass sitting on a little box, normally positioned at the left side of the ruler. It actually consists of three parts: The top upside-down triangle sets the indentation for the first line of the paragraph, the middle triangle sets the indentation for the remaining lines of the paragraph, and the box at the bottom sets the indentation for the paragraph. Try dragging the different parts of the indentation doohickey to see what happens. Have fun. Good luck.

Don’t even bother with this stuff about tab types

PowerPoint isn’t limited to just boring left-aligned tabs. In all, it has four distinct types of tabs: left, right, center, and decimal. The square button that appears at the far-left side of the ruler when you select text tells you which type of tab is added when you click the ruler. Click this button to cycle through the four types of tabs:

· Standard left-aligned tab: Press Tab to advance the text to the tab stop.

· Right-aligned tab: Text is aligned flush right with the tab stop.

· Centered tab: Text lines up centered over the tab stop.

· Decimal tab: Numbers line up with the decimal point centered over the tab stop.

Each text object is initially set up with default tab stops set at every inch. When you add a tab stop, any default tab stops located to the left of the new tab stop disappear.

To remove a tab stop, use the mouse to drag the tab stop off the ruler. (For instance, click the tab stop, drag it off the ruler, and then release the mouse button.)

Spacing out

Feeling a little spaced out? Try tightening the space between text lines. Feeling cramped? Space out the lines a little. These steps show you how to do it all:

1. Highlight the paragraph — or paragraphs — whose line spacing you want to change.

2. Click the Line Spacing button and then select the amount of line spacing you want.

The Line Spacing button displays the most common line spacing options: 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 2.5, and 3.0. If you want to set the line spacing to a value that’s not shown on the Line Spacing button, select Line Spacing Options to display the Paragraph dialog box, as shown in Figure 7-7.

Figure 7-7: Change the line spacing.

Lining things up

PowerPoint enables you to control the way your text lines up on the slide. You can center text, line it up flush left or flush right, or justify it. You can change these alignments by using the alignment buttons in the Paragraph group on the Home tab. You can also use the keyboard shortcuts described in Table 7-2.

Table 7-2 Paragraph Alignment Commands

Here are some semirandom thoughts on aligning paragraphs:

· Centered text lines up right down the middle of the slide. Actually, text lines up down the middle of the text object that contains the text; a text line appears centered on the slide only if the text object is centered on the slide.

· Bulleted lists look best when left-aligned. Otherwise, the bullets don’t line up.

Making columns

Most slides place all their text in a single column. However, you can easily create multiple columns by using the Columns button, found in the Paragraph section of the Home tab. To create a one-, two-, or three-column layout, just click the Columns button and then choose one, two, or three columns from the menu that appears. If you want more than three columns, select the More Columns command and then choose the number of columns you want to use.

Creating Fancy Text with WordArt

Previous versions of PowerPoint included a feature called WordArt that let you insert special objects that could incorporate fancy text effects, such as gradient fills or curved paths. For PowerPoint 2016, Microsoft has integrated WordArt into PowerPoint, so that you can apply WordArt formatting to any bit of text in your presentation just by highlighting the text and applying the WordArt formats. Figure 7-8 is an example of what you can do with WordArt in just a couple of minutes.

Figure 7-8: You, too, can create fancy text effects like this using WordArt.

Follow these steps to transform mundane text into something worth looking at:

1. Select the text you want to apply WordArt formatting to.

The text can be anywhere in your presentation. For example, you can apply WordArt formatting to a slide title or body text.

2. Click the Drawing Tools Format tab.

The Drawing Tools Format tab includes a WordArt Styles group, shown in Figure 7-9. As you can see, this Ribbon group includes several pre-configured WordArt styles as well as buttons that let you control the text fill, outline style, and text effects such as shadows and glowing.

3. Click the More button found at the bottom of the scroll bar to the right of the predefined WordArt styles.

The WordArt Quick Styles gallery appears, as shown in Figure 7-10.

4. Select the WordArt style that most closely resembles the formatting you want to apply.

Don’t worry if none of the gallery choices exactly match the effect you want; you can tweak the text’s appearance later.

5. Fool around with other WordArt controls in the WordArt Styles group of the Drawing Tools Format tab.

Table 7-3 describes the other controls in the WordArt Styles group. Experiment with these controls as much as you want until you get the text to look just right.

Figure 7-9: The WordArt Styles group on the Drawing Tools Format tab.

Figure 7-10: The WordArt Quick Styles gallery.

Table 7-3 Buttons on the WordArt Drawing Tools Format Tab

The Text Effects button is the key to creating fancy logos, such as text that wraps around circles or text that has a three-dimensional look. When you click this button, a menu with various text formatting options appears. Table 7-4 lists the formatting options available on this menu.

Table 7-4 Formatting Options on the Text Effects Menu