Microsoft Powerpoint 2007 – Formatting Text

Powerpoint 2007 Text Effects

If you are familiar with the text formatting commands available in Word 2007, you have a head start when formatting text in Powerpoint 2007. The same methods used to change the font, colour, size etc. of text are used here. Also on offer are some other pretty impressive effects.
The first thing to do once you have entered some text on a slide is to select it by dragging the cursor over it. Right click on your selection and select Format Text Effects.

There are many different options available here so we will confine our exploration to the more commonly used effects found in the following categories:

Text Fill

Text consists of a fill and an outline which goes around the fill. This option specifies what properties the fill of the text will have and you can select:

No Fill

You might initially think that this option has little use, as without a fill how can you see the text? Well, if you specify that the text has an outline, you can see it and doing this gives your text a unique look.

Solid Fill

Choosing this option gives your text a solid fill colour.

Gradient Fill

This option gives your text a start colour and an end colour and then smoothly changes from one to the other. You can use the preset colors drop down list to select a prebuilt colour scheme or you can specify your own colours. Use the type drop down list to specify whether your gradient is linear, radial, rectangular or path. As you might imagine, the direction drop down list alters the direction that the gradient runs. The angle input box allows you to set the orientation of the gradient. It’s a good idea to just have a go yourself and change the different settings to further your understanding. Fine control over our gradient is given to us with the gradient stops settings. These allow us to specify what colours appear where on our gradient, and how transparent each colour is.

Picture or texture fill

Specify that your text will be filled with a ready made texture by using the Texture button, or use the Insert from: buttons to fill your text with an image. You can choose an image that exists on your hard drive by using the File button or you can use clipart by clicking the Clip Art button. If you have previously copied an image to your clipboard, clicking the Clipboard button will paste it to your text.

Text Outline

You can use the options here to give your text no fill, a solid line (you can specify its colour and transparency) or a gradient. See the above explanation of gradients to learn how to apply a gradient to an outline.

Outline Style

The outline style category lets you change the attributes of your outline. These attributes include the outline’s width, type etc.

Shadow

To really make your text stand out, you can add a subtle shadow. There’s a useful library of pre-made shadow effects for you to choose from, but you can also fine tune your shadow’s properties using the settings below.

3D Format

The 3D format category provides a way for you to add a bevel to your selected text. Be aware that bevel effects look better on chunky fonts such as arial black (it’s hard to see a bevel on narrower fonts).

3D Rotation

You can rotate text on a particular axis by the angle you specify using the options here.

Text Box

The settings here allow you to change:

• the horizontal alignment of the text within its text box – e.g. top, bottom or middle
• the direction that the text flows
• autofitting options – whether to shrink text to fit the text box when it overflows, or to resize the text box instead
• internal margins – how far away from the text box edge the text is pushed
• columns – how many columns the text is distributed