Work with text in PowerPoint - PowerPoint Tutorial

- [Instructor] Text is one of the most important elements in any presentation. It's how you communicate key ideas, support visuals, and guide your audience. But if it's not formatted well, it can be distracting or even unreadable. First, let's talk about how to add text. In addition to placeholders like these ones, text can be added via text boxes and shapes. To insert a text box, go to the Insert tab and click on Text Box. Draw it into your slide roughly where you want it. You can always adjust it later. Then you can start typing or paste in text that you already have. For a shape, it's a similar process. Go to Insert. Select Shapes and choose the shape you want to draw in. I'll draw in a rectangle, and similarly, I can Control + V to paste in my text. I'll delete this one and keep working with the text box. Now that we have text on the slide, let's format it. To edit just some of the text, such as this word, use your cursor to highlight it. I'll go to the Home tab and select B for bold. I'll do the same for these other two. You can also hit Control + B on your keyboard for bolding text. If you want to edit all the text in one go, simply click on the outline of the text box. Then you can go up to the Home tab and adjust, let's say the font size. Some tips for working with text. Stick to the template's default text formatting whenever possible. PowerPoint's placeholders are designed to keep things consistent, so changing them too much can throw off your design. You can use bold, italics, or underline for emphasis, but don't overdo it. If you need more formatting options such as superscript or strikethrough, open the font dialogue box by clicking on the little arrow here in the Font area. This is where you'll find more underlined styles, as well as superscript and subscript. Next, let's talk about paragraph options. Good spacing improves readability. You can increase the space between lines and paragraphs to create separation between the blocks of text. This helps avoid crammed, hard to read slides. To control spacing, click on the downward facing arrow in the Paragraphs group up here in the ribbon. To add space before or after each paragraph, adjust the options here. I'm going to add a little bit of space after each paragraph. To make the line height taller or shorter, adjust the line spacing options here. To make it bigger, we can make it 1.5 lines, or if we want to make the text a little bit tighter, we can select Multiple, and instead of 3, we can type in 0.9. This makes the spacing a little tighter while still keeping it readable. Once I click OK, notice everything adjusts. Now once our text is spaced out well, we can now use bullets and numbering to break up information and make it easier to scan. Bullets are great for listing key points, and numbering is useful when there's a sequence or steps to follow. Let's add bullets to these points. Going to select all three lines of text. Go to the Paragraphs area and click on bullets. To adjust indentation, we can click on increase or decrease indent. Bullets help break up information, and subtle effects can enhance text, but remember, clarity always comes first. Finally, let's talk about how text behaves within its container. Let's right click our text box and select Format Shape. Then click on Text Options, and then on the text box icon. This pane has several important options. First, we can choose whether we want the text to sit on the top of the text box, in the middle or at the bottom. Here we have our text Autofit options. Do not Autofit means that the text box will not adjust, meaning text can overflow or get cut off if it doesn't fit. Shrink text on overflow reduces text size automatically if the content exceeds the text box boundaries, and Resize shape to fit text expands the text box as needed to fit all of the text without shrinking the font. Next, we have our margins. These control the space between the text and the edges of the text box. And finally, Wrap text in shape ensures text stays inside the shape by breaking lines when needed. And those are the key things to know about working with text in PowerPoint. It may seem simple, but getting it right makes a huge difference in how professional your slides look.