Microsoft® Office 2008 for Mac® Bible

Chapter 21. Formatting Slides

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Assigning formatting attributes to text

• Applying formatting effects to other slide elements

• Adding backgrounds to slides

As the author and creator of the presentations you make in PowerPoint, you have complete control over how things look. You're in charge of everything from fonts and sizes to backgrounds and color. This may seem a little overwhelming at first, but as you'll soon see, PowerPoint makes it easy to manage all these things through formatting controls found throughout the program. Even if you turn over most of the formatting to PowerPoint's themes or templates, chances are good that your slides will need a little tweaking from time to time. You may need to make the font more legible on a background or make the bulleted text larger to fill up some space. In this chapter, you learn how to utilize all the formatting controls to make your presentations look their very best.

Formatting Text

Many presentations utilize text boxes to convey a message. As such an important slide element, text boxes are often one of the first things you need to format when you're making changes to the appearance of a slide. For example, sometimes you can improve the legibility of slide text simply by making it bold or bigger. Or maybe you want to add emphasis by italicizing a keyword or phrase in a text box. This section covers all the various formatting techniques you can apply to your presentation text. When it comes to formatting techniques, PowerPoint ...