5 Amazingly Simple PowerPoint Text Tips to Try

5 Amazingly Simple PowerPoint Text Tips to Try
October 21, 2013

When creating PowerPoint presentations, identifying how and when to use text to effectively enhance your message requires some thoughtful consideration.  While the right graphics and charts can work wonders to transform a boring slide deck, the fact is, most presentations require some form of text. So why not make working with text in PowerPoint as simple and efficient as possible?

Try these five tips and shortcuts to make PowerPoint text your friend!

Insert special characters
When creating business presentations, you might need to reference brands or products that should be accompanied by copyright, trademark, or registered symbols.  While you can access the full menu of special symbols by clicking Insert > Symbol > More Symbols, you can also add these symbols with these helpful keyboard shortcuts.

  • For the Copyright symbol ©, type the following characters: (c)

  • For the Trademark symbol ™ , type the following characters: (tm)

  • For the Registered symbol ®, type the following characters: (r)

Capitalize a block of text
Sometimes it isn’t clear at the outset which elements of a slide need emphasis, or even how the emphasis should be added until the design process begins.  The good news is PowerPoint makes it simple to change font type, style, size and color using the dropdown menus at the top of the screen.  You can also easily change a block of text to all lowercase or all capital with two keystrokes.  To toggle between font cases:

  1. Click the text box, or highlight the segment of text you would like to capitalize

  2. Hold down Shift + F3

Animate text
A great way to systematically introduce crucial points in your presentation is by animating keywords or phrases to represent each point.  Whether you’re using a bulleted list, or just simple lines of text, you can easily animate each point to enter your slide, without manually animating each line. Here’s how to do it: 

  1. Click the text box that contains the text you would like to animate

  2. Select the Animations ribbon at the top of the screen and choose the desired animation

  3. Click Effect Options in the Animations ribbon

  4. Select By Paragraph from the Sequence options


This will animate each line of text within that text box to sequentially enter the slide.  

Convert PowerPoint text boxes into images
On occasion, it can be beneficial to covert text boxes into images for better control over size and dimensions.  This process is quick and painless, and doesn’t even require an image converter! Just use these steps:

  1. Click the text box you would like to animate

  2. Hold down Ctrl + C to copy the text box

  3. Hold down Ctrl + Alt +V to open the Paste Special box

  4. Select the desired image file format (PNG, GIF, JPEG)


Resize PowerPoint text in proportion with graphics
One particular scenario in which converting text boxes to images comes in handy is when you want to proportionally resize text and a corresponding graphic.


To accomplish this, first follow the steps above to convert your text box to an image. Then hold down Ctrl + G, and click the elements of the slide that you would like to resize in proportion with each other.  This will group the elements so that you can then resize the entire group by dragging the corner of the outermost image boundary. 


More PowerPoint Tips:

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