Enter Text Into A PowerPoint Presentation


Generally, you’ll add text and edit your slides simply by clicking where the text is to go and typing the text. You can make edits directly on the slide and see the results of those edits as you make them. To add text to a new slide, you must insert the new slide in your presentation. The new slide will hold the text you want to type. The layout you apply to the slide determines how your text appears and whether graphics might also appear with the text. When you want to edit some text, you’ll actually be editing text within a text box that lies on a slide. To edit text in a text box, click that text box to activate it and to place the text cursor inside it.

PowerPoint displays the text box surrounded by sizing handles. PowerPoint treats a slide’s title as a single object and the slide’s bulleted set of items as another object. Both of these objects are text objects, and they will appear inside an editable text box when you click them.

Although PowerPoint’s layouts define where text will go and how large that text will be, there will be many times when you want to change the text format to something else.

You can control many factors related to your presentation’s text, including the following:

• Choose the alignment (such as left and right justification)

• Change the text size

• Change the font

• Animate the text

• Change the text to a 3-D format

If you’ve used other Office programs, such as Word, you’ll feel at home with some of PowerPoint’s formatting tools because the font-related options are similar to those of the other Office programs.

Request a New Slide
To insert a brand-new slide, click the down arrow at the bottom of the Home ribbon’s New Slide button and select a layout that best matches the slide you want to insert. A new slide appears in your PowerPoint editing area, and the Slides pane shows a thumbnail of the new slide. Depending on the type of layout you choose, placeholders will show you where to add text.

Add Text to the Slide
Click any placeholder. If the placeholder rests in a title area, you’ll be able to add a title to the slide. If the placeholder resides inside a large text box, you will be able to add multiple lines of bulleted text to that area.

Select the Text to Format
If you want to format any of the text on the slide, select the text. PowerPoint’s mini toolbar appears, from which you can click to select common formatting options such as boldface, italic, text-alignment, font changes, and coloring of the text.

Apply a WordArt Style
The Home ribbon not only contains standard formatting buttons such as underlining and paragraph formats (many of which are also available on the mini toolbar), but it also enables you to turn your selected slide text into WordArt text and give your text a more dramatic look. As you pass your mouse pointer over the WordArt option buttons, PowerPoint’s live preview shows what the slide’s text will look like if you were to apply that WordArt to the selected text by clicking the WordArt buttons or by clicking the down arrow to the right of the WordArt buttons and selecting from the list that appears.

Change the Text to 3-D
You can convert selected text to three-dimensional text by clicking the Format ribbon’s Text Effects button and selecting from the list of 3-D formats that appears.

Adjust the 3-D Text
After you apply a 3-D effect to text, you can change the rotation angle of the text. With the 3-D text selected and the sizing handles appearing, you’ll see that a green circle appears at the top of the center sizing handle. Click and drag the green circle left or right to adjust the rotation angle of the 3-D text.