Office 2007: The Missing Manual

Chapter 19.  Formatting and Aligning Your Text

Content may be king, but presentation is queen. You’re going to spend a lot of time choosing just the right text to add to your slides, so don’t blow all that hard work by ignoring the way your text looks. If your text is hard to read or conveys a message counter to the point you’re trying to make—if you choose whimsical, candy-colored fonts for a presentation introducing your company’s expanded line of funeral services, for example—you’re going to confuse (or even lose) your audience.

This chapter shows you how to format your text effectively. You’ll find out how to choose fonts, colors, and special effects (such as underlining and shadowing) that support and strengthen your message (Figure 19-1), and how to avoid the effects that detract from it (Figure 19-2).

Automating Text Formatting

PowerPoint gives you more options for formatting text than a normal human being will ever need—everything from the basic (bold, italics, underlining) to the wacky (beveling, stacking, 3-D rotation). And it gives you two ways to take advantage of these options: automatically, and manually.

• Automatic. If you haven’t finished adding text to your slides, you can turn on one or more of PowerPoint’s automatic formatting features to tell the program to catch basic formatting and punctuation goofs for you as you type.

• Manual. If you’ve already added text to your slides or want to apply fancy effects, you’ll need to format your text manually—either by applying individual ...