Formatting Text in PowerPoint 2016
During this Microsoft PowerPoint 2016 training tutorial video, we will demonstrate how to format text like the font style and font size. Other points being discussed here are boldface, italics, underline, text shadow, strike through, spacing between the letters, text color, superscript, subscript, small caps, all caps, equalize character height and format painter.
Okay so we’ve made it down to module four now and this is where we’re going to talk about the text and the bullet editing options.
So you probably notice when you typed your text in or your bullets that you got some default ones automatically. So I want to show you how to change some of that stuff in this particular module. Now this is the first section, Formatting the Text, so we’re going to talk a little bit about how to change the color of the text, the size, things like that, anything having to do with the text right now. So let me flip back over to our exercise we were working with and we’ll go ahead and see how this works.
Okay so we’re back in My Presentation and if you remember when we left off in module three we were actually talking a little bit about putting some bullets in. So I’m back on slide one here. Now any time you click inside of an object, I’ll take the title for example, you’re going to get what’s called a placeholder or a box that pops up around your object. Now this object is called a placeholder because it holds the place for whatever is inside of the object. It might be text, it could be a picture, who knows. But right now we’re working with text.
Now you’ll also notice that when you’re working with an object you’ve got these control handles or sizing handles those sometimes are called in the corners and on the edges here. And these just allow you to change the size of the object. So remember it doesn’t actually change the font size. It changes the size of the object.
Now we’re used to dragging across the text when we want to actually change the text and that will work here in PowerPoint but one of the things I’m going to say a hundred times is click on the placeholder itself when you want to change something within the object. Now what I mean by that is see how if you place your mouse right on the line you can click. That’s how you select your placeholder. Notice there’s no cursor in there for typing.
Now any changes I make will only affect what’s inside of this placeholder. If you’d only selected one word then sometimes when you do other things they won’t work. So you’re going to see that as we go along.
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Now let’s go up and talk a little bit about your font options. And I’m sure you’re familiar with a lot of these if you’ve worked in other Microsoft Office products. So let’s start with your actual font itself. Now this is the list of fonts you get in PowerPoint. You can see if you just move your mouse over any one particular font that it shows you what it’s going to look like. And if you like that one go ahead and click on it.
Also you’re going to see the size. So you’re used to text being in size 12 if you work in Word for example. But in PowerPoint remember bigger is better. So we had talked about some of the generic sizes you get and remember that 48, 54, those are some generic sizes. This ones actually got 72 automatically and that’s fine in this case. But if you want to change it just pick a different number here. Now also remember that if you want a size that’s not in this list you can type it. So if I wanted I don’t know, let’s say 65.5 see how I can type it here. And if I hit the Enter key then that’s the size that I get.
Also see this large A and small A right here? So if you’re playing with this list and you say 36 is too small and then you pick another size that’s too big then play with the large A which will increase your font size by one or the small A which will decrease your font size by one. So you can always do it this way and it’s more of a visual. You can see if that’s the particular size that you like.
Now down here you have B for Bold, I is for Italics and U is for Underline. Now if you’re underlining you’re underlining the text only. You’re not underlining the actual placeholder. So just kind of know that.
Also this S is probably a new one to you. It’s a shadowed tool. So depending what color you’ve chosen you could see a little shadowed effect when you turn it on or off.
Now this is going to be your strikethrough. You’re probably not going to use it here but if you had something that you had edited then you might want to leave the original text. You can strike through it.
Alright your next one over is going to work with the spacing between the letters. So if you choose a tight or a very tight your text will look like it’s very close together whereas a loose or a very loose will allow you to have more space between your letters. This one’s just set on normal so I’ll leave it there.
Now this one here where it says Change Case. So you probably notice that in some of the templates no matter if you type with uppercase or lowercase that it’s going to make the letters uppercase automatically and that’s true in this particular template we started with. But sometimes you may need to change the case. So Sentence Case allows you to have the first letter capital and everything else is small.
You’re also going to have a period at the end of that particular one. Lowercase is all small letters. Uppercase is all uppercase letters like we have here. You can also choose to capitalize each word. They used to call that title case. And then the last one is where you toggle. So you’ve probably seen before where you accidently has the Caps Lock key on and the first letter was small and everything else was capital. This just kind of flips it.
Okay so those are some of your generic options right there for font. Here’s your color. I forgot to tell you that. You can change the color of the text, any color you’d like it to be.
Now I’m going to go ahead and click this little arrow and see if we have any additional options. So if we wanted to go ahead and change our text font here we could. Here’s our bold and our italics we talked about, here’s size. Let’s make it a little bit smaller. How about 70? Let’s go down to 75, let’s just say. Remember how I said you could type it in here? Here’s your font color and your underlined style. Now there’s a couple new things here.
With the underline button up on your ribbon here, this one, you could only pick a straight underline. Here you’ve got dotted underlines, you’ve got dashed underlines, you’ve got different styles of underlines you can choose from. And by the way if you do pick an underline you can pick a color for your underline as well but I’m going to go ahead and take that back off and say none.
We saw strikethrough already. Here’s a double strikethrough. And then super and subscript. And if you don’t know what those are a good example of superscript is if you’ve seen Mattel toys before and they have that little trademark, the little TM that’s up, that’s superscript. Subscript is like H2O where the two is down below.
Your last couple checkboxes here. You’ve got small caps. So those will be capital letters but they’ll be a little smaller. You’ve got all caps or you can equalize the character height. Now what this last one does here is it’s going to retain the fact that you have upper and lowercase letters but they’re all going to be the same height.
Here’s some options for character spacing here as well. You can actually do what’s called kerning. So if you wanted to say it’s more or less points above can do that. So normally we’d just leave this on normal.
Alright let me click OK here and now you can see all the choices that you picked.
Now let’s talk about your Format Painter tool for just a second. Let’s say that I wanted my subtitle down here, Overview of Campus Life, to look exactly like my title as far as the formatting. I want the same color, same size. I really don’t remember everything I picked. So let me show you how this works because this tool here, Format Painter, is going to copy all of your formatting from wherever you tell it, in this case our title, to the subtitle in this case.
So here’s how it’s going to work. You want to select where you’re copying from. So notice I selected the placeholder around my title. I’m going to click Format Painter just one time. Notice the little paintbrush attached to it. And now I’m going to click inside the subtitle. And you can see now they are the exact same size.
Now obviously this looks very funny like this so I could actually just make it a little bit smaller and then it would have the same characteristics except the size. So a lot of times that works great and you don’t have to manually pick all those options.
Now I want to show you one thing that’s going to happen. I’m going to undo this for a moment, all the way back here. Remember how I said select the placeholder? Well here’s a good example of when you don’t select it what happens. Notice that I’m clicked inside of this word Welcome or I could just select just this one word.
Now if I click Format Painter now and click inside the subtitle notice it only changed one word because PowerPoint thinks I only want to affect one word because I only had one word selected. So I’m going to go ahead and undo that but I just want you to kind of know that. Okay?
Let me go ahead and make this the color I want and I’m going to copy the formatting to my subtitle, make it a lot smaller here and then it looks a lot nicer.
Alright so remember all of that when you’re formatting your text.
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Now one last quick thing I’ll tell you. You do have the ability to take all of your formatting off and that’s going to be this one here. So whatever you have selected that’s going to affect.
And then the last quick thing I want to mention is this. I don’t want you to change any more formatting as we go forward. And that’s because we’re going to be talking about the masters in a later module. And a master is a place you can go to globally make any changes as far as formatting. But it won’t override the ones you manually changed. So just kind of keep that in the back of your mind for now until we get to the master section a little bit later.
Okay?
So that’s a little bit about how the formatting works. So let’s go ahead and go over into section two and talk about doing some formatting with your bullets or changing the bullets there.
Simon Calder
Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA.He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!
