Are you ready to begin creating some slides? Since most presentation slides contain text, let’s start with adding text, editing and changing text attributes and some other features particular to text.

PowerPoint can have 999 slides in a file. I don’t recommend you have this many in one file but it is nice to know you can have as many as you really want. (Too many slides create very large files which may be hard for your computer to open. Keep file sizes small.) A typical file size with about 10 inserted scanned images should be no more than 1-3 megs. If your file starts to get to 20 - 50 megs with just a few images in it, you need to review the section on Resolution and Scanning to more appropriately size your images.

To add new pages to your presentation, click on Common Tasks toolbar (make sure Common Tasks toolbar is visible ...if not refer to View Toolbars and make it visible) and select New Slide. Choose the Page Layout you wish to have for your new slide. See Example of Page Layout on Common Tasks Toolbar.

Click with the left mouse button on any of the “Click to add ...” boxes. Type your text and PowerPoint will format the text in font, style, color and alignment of the template. Click outside the text box edges to deselect the text box. To change text, click on text and the text box will reappear and changes can be made (see Editing Text). You can ignore a placeholder if you don't want to use it. Even though placeholders always appear on your screen when you are in Normal and Slide View mode, unused placeholders won't print or appear in a Slide Show View display. See Example.

Click on the text tool (Icon of ruled page of paper with letter A located on Drawing Toolbar) and move cursor to the point on slide where you want to add text. Click the mouse button and begin typing to add text.

To get a text box of a certain size, hold down the mouse button while dragging the mouse down and to the right, releasing it when text box is the size you want. Type the text.

Text entered using the text tool can only be added on the Slide view.

Adding text in Outline View allows you to type all of your text as if it is an outline. Tools along the left side of Outline View allow you to promote, demote or move the various lines of text in your outline. You can only add titles and bulleted list text in outline view. See Example of Text added into Outline View.

White diagonal lined border around the text allows you to edit the text, change words, correct spellings, delete text, etc. This border appears when you first click on the text box.

Dotted pattern border around the text allows you to move the text box or change the dimensions. With this pattern, you can point at the border (pointer changes to a four-headed arrow) and click on the border and move the text box.
The white square selection boxes should be visible in this mode too, so you can resize the text box. To resize the box, position mouse pointer on a selection handle (small white square) at edge of text box, until you get double-headed arrow and then press mouse button and drag border, releasing mouse button when box is size you want.

Text can be aligned on the left, right, center or justified (lined up on right and left sides). To change the alignment, simply click in the text box and chose the preferred alignment either in the menu commands (Format - Align) or in the toolbar (Standard Toolbar).

For PowerPoint to know which text to adjust, highlight all text you want to change the Line Spacing on. To modify preset spacing between lines of text, choose Format - Line Spacing. Choose the spacing mode you want to separate text lines with, either in the Lines or Points measurement. You can also change the spacing before and after paragraphs.

Changing Text Font, Size, Color and Style

To make changes to the type in your presentation:

In the Font dialog box, click on Color box to change the text color. See example of Font Dialog Box.

A pop-up box will appear in which you can choose one of the Automatic, Displayed or More Colors. See example.

Automatic colors are those colors associated with the particular design template you are using.

Displayed Colors are those colors that you have selected to use at some point in developing your presentation.

More colors will take you into another dialog box with all color choices. If you choose the Standard tab, there will be a honeycomb of available colors to choose from. Click on the color of your choice. Under the Custom tab, you can define your own color by positioning the crosshair over the color you want or by manually adjusting the red, green and blue settings. When you have the color you want, click OK to add it to the selection of colors.

If you want to colorize a single word, position cursor in the word before you choose Format-Font. You don’t need to highlight the word for PowerPoint to change the color of that one word. To color more than one word, the text must be highlighted.

To change color of the text box (this colors the box surrounding the text, not the text itself), select text box and click on Format - Placeholder command in the menu commands. In the Colors and Lines Tab, click on the Color box to change the color of the text box.

No Fill in the Fill Color and Line Color pop-up menus means that the selected object takes on the color of the background or is transparent.

Choose Tools-Spelling to check for spelling errors.
When you right click on a misspelled word in a text box but do not highlight the text itself, the Spell checker dialog box pops up. From this box, select the appropriate spelling of the word, ignore it or add to the dictionary. When the word is spelled correctly according to PowerPoint’s dictionary, the pop-up box will have the selections to change font, cut, paste, and animate text as well as other commands.

Tools-Style Checker checks your file for spelling, visual clarity and case and end punctuation. In the Tools-Options dialog box, you can set the style parameters you want checked when you select this command.

PowerPoint will automatically wrap lines of text if they exceed the margins set by the text box. If you don’t like the way it does this, resize the text box to wrap the text the way you want by clicking on and stretching a corner handle box.
See example.

PowerPoint Lessons Table of Contents

Last updated January 2002. These courses are copyrighted by the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Communications and Information Technology. Contact Lana Johnson at ljohnson1@unl.edu