PowerPoint

Unit 1: Creating a Presentation with PowerPoint

Lesson 2: Enhancing the look of your Presentation

How do you change the format of text?

In the word processing module we discussed paragraph and character formatting. PowerPoint provides many of the same formatting commands discussed in the word processing module. If you don't remember what these formatting command are, you should review that lesson now.

You can apply character and paragraph formats using the formatting toolbar or menu options under the format menu.

PowerPoint's formatting toolbar should look familiar:

PowerPoint's formatting toolbar.

It does, however, contain 3 new buttons,

1. - Shadow. This option adds a shadow to the selected characters:
2. - Paragraph spacing. This option increases or decreases the line spacing of the selected paragraph(s).
3. - Font size. This option increases or decreases the font size of the selected characters.

The other method for specifying character and paragraph formats is with the commands under the format menu option. Notice that PowerPoint doesn't provide a Format/Paragraph menu option like Word. With PowerPoint paragraph formatting options are more limited (it's not a word processor after all). With PowerPoint the paragraph format commands are limited to Format/Line Spacing and Format/Alignment.

The following animation shows how to apply character and paragraph formats using toolbar buttons and menu options:

Copyright 1997 by the Curators of the University of Missouri