2. Everything You Need to Know About Text
In This Chapter
- Selecting Multiple Ranges of Text
- Easily Moving Text
- All Text Is WordArt
- Modifying Text Direction/Orientation
- Advanced Font Techniques
- Replacing Fonts
- Text Box Tricks
- Advanced Character Formatting
When people think of Microsoft Office and text, they usually think of Word. Word’s text handling is undoubtedly more powerful in most areas, but PowerPoint is no slouch. In this chapter, we’ll take a close look at PowerPoint’s text functionality and show you some powerful features that you might not have known about.
Selecting Multiple Ranges of Text
This section talks about selecting text, from the basic to some more advanced tips.
Text Selection Basics
The methods for selecting paragraphs or portions of text have been around seemingly since the beginning of time, or at least since the beginning of Microsoft Word. You can click and drag across the text you want to select, click into the selection, and then press Shift and an arrow key until you get to the end point of the selection, or simply triple-click in the paragraph to select it in its entirety. That’s about all there is to it.
If you want to extend a selection you already made, you can either Shift+click again at the new end point, or press Shift and the arrow key in the direction of the remainder of the desired selection.
Voilà! Your new selection is complete.
New Multiple Selection Options
New to PowerPoint 2007, you can select text discontinuously, meaning that all your text selections don’t have to touch one another as one giant selection. Here’s how:
1. Type in some text.
2. Select some of it.
3. Hold down the Ctrl key and select another range of text. You just selected two parts of text that aren’t at all connected (see Figure 2.1).
Figure 2.1 Select two discontinuous parts of the text.
4. Now you can do something to both of these ranges at the same time. For example, press Ctrl+B to make them bold.
Easily Moving Text
Now, let’s talk about two ways to move the text you selected somewhere else.
Utilizing Copy/Paste
The most straightforward way most people move text is a simple copy/paste. Select the text, press Ctrl+C or choose Clipboard on the Home ribbon tab and then click the Copy icon to copy the text. Then, put the text cursor where you want to move the text and press Ctrl+V or click the large Paste Icon on the Home ribbon tab to paste it.
Drag
Another way to move text is to simply drag it. After selecting the text, click and hold your mouse on top of the selected text, and then drag it to where you want to move it.
Here are some interesting drag tips:
- You can drag text within the same text box, but as with copy/paste, you can also move it to one or more text boxes on the same slide or to the notes pane at the bottom of the PowerPoint window.
- If you drag text to a place on the slide where there’s no target text box and release the mouse button, PowerPoint creates a new text box and drops the text into it.
- You can drag text to other PowerPoint windows. Go to the View ribbon tab, Windows group and select Arrange All to get multiple PowerPoint windows on the screen at the same time.
- You can even drag to other applications, such as Microsoft Word. Make the target window smaller, so you can see that window and your PowerPoint window at the same time. Then, just drag the text from one window to another.
- Windows lets you drag text to other Windows application windows (for example, a PowerPoint slide window, a Word document window) that you don’t currently see:
1. Select the text, move your cursor above it, and hold down the mouse button to begin a drag.
2. Drag the text to the very bottom of the monitor to the Windows taskbar and move your mouse to another application on the taskbar. Windows will bring that window to the front.
3. With your mouse button still pressed, move your cursor up into to the new application window onto some text.
4. Release the mouse button to drop the text in its new location.
- Holding down Ctrl while you’re dragging text copies the text instead of moving it.
All Text Is WordArt
One of the best features in PowerPoint 2007 is the unified editing experience for both text and shapes. In PowerPoint 97–2003, there was WordArt, which could be richly styled with all the same formatting as a shape, but regular text was relegated to simple formatting such as solid color fills, bold, italics, and underline.
In PowerPoint 2007, there is no longer the distinction. Type in a text placeholder, select a few of the characters, and then you can apply a gradient fill, add a glow, or even apply 3D effects (see Figure 2.2). You’ll learn more about formatting text in Chapters 11 through 13, where we discuss themes and formatting.
Figure 2.2 Richly styled text.
WordArt or Text?
Despite the WordArt/text unification, PowerPoint is somewhat inconsistent in its terminology—sometimes calling it WordArt and sometimes calling it Text. On the Insert tab, in the Text group, you find an entire WordArt section. If you right-click some selected text though, the contextual menu contains a Format Text Effects option.
Some of this is a holdover from previous versions of Office, where there was a difference between the two; but rest assured that there’s no difference any more in Office 2007 between WordArt and regular text, and the two terms can be used interchangeably.
Modifying Text Direction/Orientation
Here’s an example of changing text direction. This lets you set different rotation values on text and the shape in which it’s contained. For example, you could rotate text 90 degrees and rotate the shape it’s inside 25 degrees. Here’s how you set text rotation:
1. Type a few words into the title placeholder.
2. Give the placeholder shape a gradient fill by selecting the placeholder shape, and then going to the Shape Styles group of the Format tab and choosing Shape Fill item, Gradient, and selecting your favorite gradient.
3. On the Home tab in the Paragraph group, choose Text Direction, and then choose a text direction like Rotate All Text 270 degrees. Notice how the gradient is unchanged, but the text all rotates.
Tip
New to PowerPoint 2007 is the ability to set text columns inside a shape. Just select a shape; then go to the Home tab, and in the Paragraph group, click the Columns icon and choose how many columns of text that you want. It’s useful if you have a long block of text you want to break up.
Advanced Font Techniques
Select some text, and then you can change fonts on the Home tab in the Font group using the Font drop-down.
Live Preview
One of our favorite Office 2007 features is Live Preview, which we first mentioned in Chapter 1, “Introducing the Office 2007 User Interface.” Try it:
1. Type some text and select it.
2. Click on the Font drop-down to show the list of fonts, but don’t click on any of the font names.
3. Hover over one of the font names. Watch as your text changes instantly, giving you a preview of how it will look before you actually pick a new font (see Figure 2.3).
Figure 2.3 Preview how a font will look by hovering over it in the font picker.
Theme Fonts
The first two font choices in the Font drop-down are Theme Fonts—one marked for Headings and the other marked for Body. These two fonts are derived from the current Theme Fonts set in the Design tab on the Themes group under Fonts.
Here are some reasons why you would pick a Theme Font when formatting text:
- By default, these two fonts are picked by the theme designer, who probably makes a living designing stuff you wouldn’t dream of designing. It will probably look better and be better coordinated with the rest of the presentation’s visuals.
- If you later change your mind about, say, how all the Body fonts in your presentation look, you can easily change that font (again, on the Design tab in the Themes group under Fonts), and all text in your presentation that you formatted as Body font will automatically update. This won’t happen if you select a non-theme font.
- If you copy/paste text formatted with a themed font to another presentation, or to a Word or Excel file, the pasted text automatically updates to whatever the font is in the target file’s theme. For example, if the Body font in your presentation is Helvetica, and the Body font in the file you pasted your text into is Garamond, the pasted text automatically becomes formatted with the Garamond font without you having to do anything else to it.
Anything you ever wanted to know about font schemes and themes is described in Chapter 11, “Dissecting Themes.”
New Fonts for 2007
Windows Vista and Office 2007 come with a few new fonts. This means that PowerPoint 2007 now has them as well.
The new fonts were designed to look best with ClearType enabled, which is a sub-pixel antialiasing technology first introduced in Windows XP in 2001. It makes everything on your computer screen look smoother. Windows Vista turns on ClearType by default. You can enable it in Windows XP by using Microsoft’s ClearType tuner at http://www.microsoft.com/typography/cleartype/tuner/Step1.aspx.
Microsoft’s promotion literature writes paragraphs about each new font. There’s a lot to say about each one, but we’ll keep it short here and just include a brief description about each of the main new PowerPoint 2007 fonts (see Table 2.1).
Table 2.1 New Fonts in PowerPoint 2007
Sans-serif means that a font doesn’t have the little “serif” features at the end of each stroke but soft rounded corners instead. Serif means that it does have these little feet (see Figure 2.4).
Figure 2.4 Serifs and sans-serif.
Replacing Fonts
Replacing fonts is a helpful way to save time if you need to quickly change the look of all the text in your document. All you have to do is make sure that you use the same font when you start typing. When you decide you want to change all words of that same font to something different, do the following:
Click the Home tab, and in the Editing group, click the little arrow to the right of Replace and choose Replace Fonts (see Figure 2.5).
Figure 2.5 Find the Replace Fonts option in the Editing group of the Home tab.
Note
Question marks in front of the font name in the Replace box indicate that the font is not available on the current system.
You’ll notice that the simple dialog has two options, Replace and With. These options enable you to select two fonts, and then after clicking the Replace button, all text is changed from one font to another (see Figure 2.6).
Figure 2.6 Choose the font to replace and what to replace it with.
You can distinguish text by choosing different temporary font types while you type, and then make a second pass later to revise the fonts to their final types.
One example of when you might use this is when you’re editing a presentation you got from a colleague and it uses a font that isn’t installed on your computer. Without having the font used to create the text, it shows up as Times New Roman by default. Fear not! All you have to do is go to the Replace Fonts dialog and replace Times New Roman with a font that looks similar to what you desire.
This feature does not replace text within Pictures, even Metafiles (Windows Metafile Format, Enhanced Metafile Format).
Text Box Tricks
PowerPoint allows for text boxes to make it especially easy to add text anywhere on the slide (Insert tab on the Text group under the Text Box button). Let’s explore text boxes for a little bit.
Horizontal and Vertical Text Boxes
PowerPoint users who use Asian languages can create both horizontal and vertical text boxes. To make the Vertical Text Box option appear, click the Office Button and choose PowerPoint Options. In the Popular section on the left, click the Language Settings button and add an Asian language such as Chinese. Restart PowerPoint.
After you’ve done this, if you click the arrow on the Text Box button on the Insert tab in the Text group, you’ll see two types of text boxes that can be inserted—Horizontal Text Box and Vertical Text Box.
Caution
Language Setting choices change your settings in all Office applications, not just PowerPoint.
Advanced Text Box Options
While we’re in the advanced Text Box options dialog, let’s look at some of these other choices (see Figure 2.7 and Table 2.2).
Figure 2.7 Advanced Text Box tweaks.
Table 2.2 Advanced Text Box Options
Turn a Text Box into a Regular Shape
It is not well known that text can be placed inside nearly all PowerPoint shapes. In this section, we explain the relationship between PowerPoint text and PowerPoint shapes.
Automatic Text Positioning Inside Shapes
The cool thing about text in shapes is that the text knows where to live inside the shape. So, even if you insert text into a right triangle, as in the example shown in Figure 2.8, the text won’t be placed in the exact center of the shape’s bounds (sticking half inside the shape and half outside), but rather where the shape thinks text should go.
Figure 2.8 This is a great example of how text will be smart and follow where the shape tells it to go. Notice that the text does not simply land in the middle of the shape.
Text Operations with a Shape Selection
When you have a shape selected, you can perform any text operation on it, and the text inside of it will be affected. You can apply text operations, such as bold and italics (for example, at the Home tab in the Font group, click the Bold icon that has a “B” on it, or Ctrl+B), and all the text inside the shape will be formatted.
Turning a Text Box into a Shape
There is nothing inherently special about a text box. In fact, it’s just a customized rectangle shape with special settings. The following steps show you how to turn a text box into a rectangle:
1. Insert a text box by clicking on the Insert tab and choosing Text Box.
2. Type some text in it.
3. Next, let’s give it a line and a fill by using the controls on the Format tab. In the Shape Styles group, choose Shape Fill and Shape Outline. After the line and fill is applied, we already have something that looks just like a rectangle!
4. If you type a lot of text into a text box, you’ll notice that the rectangle grows to fit the text. If you want it to be truly a regular rectangle, you probably don’t want this behavior. You can turn off that setting by doing the following: Right-click the shape and select Format Shape. Choose the Text Box section on the left and then choose Do Not Autofit. You now have a shape that’s completely a rectangle in every way.
Tip
One change of the Format Shape dialog from previous versions of Office is that it’s modeless. This means that your dialog can stay up and its values immediately change depending on what you click. Try it: Launch the dialog and then click on different shapes in your presentation. Also, if you make any changes in the dialog, the changes are made immediately, without requiring you to hit an OK button at the end.
Advanced Character Formatting
The Font dialog has been beefed up in PowerPoint 2007. Select some text and access a dialog by choosing the Home tab and clicking the box launcher on the Font group, which is the little rectangle at the bottom right (see Figure 2.9).
Figure 2.9 The PowerPoint 2007 Font dialog.
Underline Style
Set an underline style by selecting one of the many choices from the drop-down (see Figure 2.10). These affect how dashed the underline is. You can select a color for the underline right next to it.
Figure 2.10 Choose an underline style from the drop-down.
Text Effects
Several text effect features are available, as shown in Figure 2.11, and are described in the following list:
- Strikethrough and double-strikethrough—Draws one or two lines through the middle of the text.
- Superscript—Raises the text higher than it usually is. You can specify an exact percentage.
- Subscript—The opposite of superscript. Makes the text lower than it usually is.
- Small caps and all caps—Changes the case of the text to “SMALL CAPS” or “ALL CAPS.” Unlike the others, selecting this is a one-time deal. In other words, if you set some text to small caps and then type some capitalized words in the middle of that text, the newly inserted text will stay capitalized.
- Equalize character heights—Makes all the letters the same height by stretching the shorter letters to be the same height as the taller letters. This one honestly looks pretty ugly for most text.
Figure 2.11 PowerPoint text effects.
Tip
Select some text and use Shift+F3 to toggle between the three different case settings: small case, UPPERCASE, and Camel Case.
Single strikethrough is available as an icon that shows a line across the letters on Home tab in the Font group (see Figure 2.12). Interestingly enough, you can click the down arrow next to the Change Case icon in the Font group to drop down a list of choices—some of which don’t appear in the Font dialog: Sentence Case, Lowercase, Uppercase, Capitalize Each Word, and Toggle Case.
Figure 2.12 Several text effects are available on the ribbon, as shown here.
You can choose Double Strikethrough, Small Caps, All Caps, and Equalize Character Height in the Effects section of the Font dialog.
Note
Strikethrough, double-strikethrough, the casing options, and Equalize Character Heights are new in PowerPoint 2007.
Character Spacing
The Character Spacing tab on the Font dialog lets you be very specific about how much spacing you want between letters (see Figure 2.13). The default Spacing option is Normal, but you can choose Expanded to increase the space between letters or Condensed to decrease the space between letters.
Figure 2.13 Character Spacing tab on the Font dialog.
Additionally, you can choose a point size for the spacing, although we don’t often find a need to be this precise. You can generally pick from the spacing choices on the ribbon’s Home tab in the Font group, and then click the character spacing button labeled with “AV” and a double-arrow (see Figure 2.14).
Figure 2.14 A drop-down list of character spacing options.
Kerning
You probably also noticed the kerning choices on the Character Spacing tab. Kerning is a typographical concept in which letters are spaced closer together, depending on which particular two letters are close to each other. For example, PowerPoint 2003 didn’t support kerning, and so there was the same distance between the A and the V as the S and the T. With kerning turned on, the first two are packed closer together (see Figure 2.15).
Figure 2.15 With kerning and tight spacing set, the V and A are noticeably spaced closer together in PowerPoint 2007 compared to PowerPoint 2003. Only certain letters will affect how close they fit together.
In general, you don’t have to worry about kerning. If you don’t like it, though, you can turn it off on the Character Spacing tab or only apply it on certain font sizes.