Chapter 7. Formatting Paragraphs and Text Boxes

In the previous chapter you learned how to format text by applying fonts, sizes, colors, attributes, and WordArt special effects. Now that your text is looking its best, you can expand the focus to the next level: paragraphs.

What can you do to an entire paragraph, as opposed to an individual text character? Plenty. For example, you can define multiple levels of bulleted and numbered lists, and you can adjust the tab stops, indentations, line spacing, and horizontal alignment for each paragraph.

All of these things happen within the context of text boxes, of course, because PowerPoint places all text in text boxes. So this chapter also takes a look at text box formatting, including fills, borders, vertical alignment, and rotation.

Formatting Bulleted Lists

For better or for worse, most PowerPoint presentations contain a lot of bulleted lists. In previous chapters, you've seen how easy it is to create a bulleted list in PowerPoint. When you create a slide based on a layout that includes a bullet list, or when you type a new slide in the outline pane, you get bullets automatically.

Note

See Chapter 2 for an analysis of why this is sometimes not the best way to go, and see Lab 1 at the end of the book to learn about alternatives.

Warning

If you apply text formatting ...

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