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About this lesson
Format text in your presentation so that it is legible and perhaps even pleasant to look at!
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Exercise files
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Formatting Text.pptx30.7 KB Formatting Text - Solution.pptx
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Quick reference
Formatting Text
Inserting text and controlling its format.
When to use
To type or paste text into a presentation.
Instructions
Pasting text
- When text is to be pasted into a content placeholder, the smart tag drop-down item can be used to:
- Use Destination Theme – the text will inherit its properties from those of the destination content placeholder
- Keep Source Formatting – the text will inherit its properties from those of the source content placeholder
- Picture – the text will be pasted to the slide as a picture
- Keep Text – the text will be pasted as unformatted
Dialog launchers on the ribbon
- The font dialog launcher on the ribbon allows you to work with:
- On the Font tab – the Latin text fonts, font color, underline styles, and various font effects
- On the Character Spacing tab – character spacing of expanded, normal or condensed
- Kerning for fonts – character spacing between letters of different widths
The mini toolbar
- The toolbar appears close to where you are working with text and allows you to change font type, size and various font effects quickly. If it doesn’t appear, right-click anywhere within the text.
Also note:
It’s better to apply font formatting to the boundary of a text box or placeholder rather than to individual text within those items.
- 00:04 This video is all about inserting and
- 00:06 typing text into objects within PowerPoint, and formatting.
- 00:09 And this can be such a big topic and we certainly can't cover everything now.
- 00:14 Now I've already got some text on the clipboard.
- 00:15 So notice that if I click within this title placeholder and
- 00:19 go Ctrl+V, and that's a keyboard shortcut to paste.
- 00:22 And then we go to the Home tab, the font is Century Gothic at 32 points in size.
- 00:29 And there's no other formatting applied such as bold or italics.
- 00:33 But with this little smart tag button, when we drop it down,
- 00:36 it shows us that the text was pasted and set to follow the destination theme.
- 00:42 So the result is exactly what would happen if we were to type the text in manually
- 00:46 within the title placeholder.
- 00:49 Century Gothic is indeed the default font used for
- 00:52 the title placeholder of the active theme.
- 00:55 If we use the same smart tag button to keep the source formatting,
- 00:58 the text is Kalinga font.
- 01:01 And that's the format that was first placed on the clipboard
- 01:05 originally of that text.
- 01:06 We can also use the smart tag to paste as a picture.
- 01:10 And the text pops out of the placeholder and winds up on the slide as a picture.
- 01:14 Paste again as non-formatted text.
- 01:17 And in this case,
- 01:18 it's just the same as the default attributes inherited from the theme.
- 01:22 If we paste the same text lower down in this content placeholder,
- 01:26 the result is different again, because the destination theme has set the formatting
- 01:29 on this placeholder to Century Gothic, and so that's what's applied to our text.
- 01:34 Now the ribbon contains various editing options within various groups.
- 01:38 And within the font group, there are buttons to change the font,
- 01:43 the font size to increase or decrease it, and a button with an eraser on
- 01:48 it to clear all of the formatting so that we can reset the text to what it was.
- 01:53 Also bold, italic, underline and so on.
- 01:58 We can also add a text shadow,
- 02:00 and sometimes that's something that people see in PowerPoint on a particular text and
- 02:04 wonder why there's a fuzzy outline around it.
- 02:07 Now make sure that anything that you change, you do with fonts that you do so
- 02:12 with the whole paragraph and not just in a specific line.
- 02:16 It's much better to select the actual boundary of the text box with
- 02:19 a placeholder and not just some text within it or it might go wonky.
- 02:23 Now wonky is Glen's way of saying that changes should be applied to all
- 02:27 of the text and not just part it unless you've got a specific reason to do so.
- 02:31 So let's have a look at the font and paragraph dialog launchers.
- 02:35 In this font dialogue box are similar options to those found on the ribbon,
- 02:39 plus lots more.
- 02:40 Latin text, fonts, the drop-down lets you choose between a theme font such
- 02:44 as heading or body, or any of the other fonts installed on your system.
- 02:49 This area is where you change the font color, the underlined style, or
- 02:53 the underlined color.
- 02:56 Effects includes items such as strikethrough, superscript, and
- 02:59 capitalization, also the equalize character height check box.
- 03:04 Try this on some of your text yourself and see what occurs.
- 03:07 On the Character Spacing tab,
- 03:09 you can change the spacing between text characters from normal to expanded.
- 03:14 The text will then more loosely fit, and
- 03:16 you can change the numbers from 0 to 200 and so on.
- 03:21 You're better off staying with it 0 and 10, by the way.
- 03:24 Condensed is the opposite of expanded, so
- 03:26 the characters will be placed closer together.
- 03:29 Again, try experimenting with this option and see the result.
- 03:31 Kerning is where the space between particular letters is adjusted to
- 03:35 take into account the width of the character.
- 03:37 So for example, characters on either side of the letter I would be brought
- 03:41 closer together so that the letters don't look unnaturally spaced.
- 03:45 For the paragraph group, we find options to change bullets and numbering, promote,
- 03:50 demote, text alignment such as left or justified,
- 03:54 line spacing and text direction, and so on.
- 03:59 This paragraph dialogue launcher also gives us access to more advanced options.
- 04:05 We find it gives us general alignment, indentations,
- 04:08 spacing options, as well as tabs.
- 04:12 Another thing well worth knowing is this little ribbon
- 04:15 that is called the mini toolbar.
- 04:16 It gives you the options of fonts, text size, formatting.
- 04:20 And if you can't see it,
- 04:22 the quickest way to activate it is to right-click on some text.
- 04:26 Remember to highlight the text and
- 04:28 then right-click if you wanna apply to all of that particular text.
- 04:32 So in summary, getting text into PowerPoint is easy as is formatting it.
- 04:36 You've got a range of options to work with on the ribbon, within dialog
- 04:39 boxes that are triggered from dialog launchers, and the mini toolbar.
- 04:44 It's worth your time exploring them because text in PowerPoint,
- 04:47 even though it is very much overused, is still very important.
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