MS PowerPoint —

Changing Paragraph and Text Formatting

Not all presentation text is created equal, and not all text falls into PowerPoint's relentless and presumed point-by-point-by-point format. Sometimes you might want to center a line of text, to make it stand out. In other presentations, you might want to ensure that each top-level bullet point has an extra bit of space after it, to make the presentation more readable from the back of the room. Then there's the inevitable bold text, and italic, and even the fontographer's nightmare, bold italic. All these treatments have a place in your repertoire of presentation tricks.

In general, PowerPoint paragraph and text formatting options mirror those available in Word. Select whatever you want to changeparagraphs, words, charactersand then apply the change. To change paragraph or text formatting for all the "regular" slides in your presentation (that is, all slides except title slides), change the Slide Master. To change paragraph or text formatting for a title slide, it's generally easier to change the slide directlyproviding your presentation has just one title slide.


Using Paragraph Formatting

All the standard paragraph formatting settings found in Word are at your disposal, including alignment (right, center, and left), spacing (double and triple), and so on. These options are accessible directly from the Format menu.

To remove bullets from a paragraph, click inside the paragraph, choose Format, Bullets and Numbering, and click None, or click the Bullets button on the Formatting toolbar.

To change tab stops and adjust the behavior of tab characters, you must use the ruler (choose View, Ruler to make it visible).

Some tab formatting options you might use in other Office applications do not exist in PowerPoint. For example, there is no easy way to put a tab stop in every cell of a table; you have to enter them all manually.