3. Text Support
In This Chapter
- Bullets and Ordered Lists
- AutoCorrect
- Understanding Tab Stops
- Understanding Paragraph Formatting
- Subtle Selection Handle Differences
- Text Formatting for Placeholders and Shapes
- Transformed Text
- PowerPoint 2007’s Proofing Tools
- What the Random?
- Shortcut Keys for Newbies and Experts
Now that you are familiar with actual text and how it works, let’s walk through some helpful text-related features that can enhance and aid your journey through creating a presentation with great text.
Bullets and Ordered Lists
Many people suffer from boring “bullet-itus.” If you’re one of those who find themselves using boring, plain, soporific bullets, pay attention because we’re about to show you how to put some life back into your presentation.
Default Bullets
There is a time and place for plain bullets, and if you find yourself stuck using them, it’s easy to create nice-looking default bullets.
If you want to just do the default circle bullet, select some text and click the Home tab, Paragraph group, and then the Bullets button, and PowerPoint inserts a bullet in front of the text (see Figure 3.1). Most placeholders already contain these regular bullets by default.
Figure 3.1 Default circle bullet.
Let’s say that you want something slightly fancier. Instead of clicking the Bullets button on the Home tab, click the arrow to the right of it to open the gallery of bullet types (see Figure 3.2).
Figure 3.2 Other default bullets choices.
Ordered Lists
Creating an ordered list uses the same techniques. The button for creating an ordered list is right next to the bullets button. Click the arrow next to the Ordered List button to select from some canned ordered lists such as 1., 2., 3.; i., ii., iii; and a), b), c).
Your Face on a Bullet
No, we’re not making a threat. But consider this: your face on a bullet. Yes, even better than on a billboard, all you need is a picture of your face and some bullet points in your presentation (see Figure 3.3).
Figure 3.3 Jeff’s dog was gracious enough to let us use her beautiful face as an example.
1. Select the text being bulleted.
2. Click the Home tab, the Paragraph group, and then the arrow to the right of the bullet icon. This time, click the Bullets and Numbering button at the bottom of the gallery (see Figure 3.4), which brings up the Bullets and Numbering dialog.
Figure 3.4 Use this button to access the Bullets and Numbering dialog from the ribbon.
3. Assuming that the defaults didn’t meet with your satisfaction, you can change the size or color of the bullets in the dialog. Or, if you want to use another symbol for the bullet, click the Customize button to open the Symbol dialog (see Figure 3.5).
Figure 3.5 You can select some preset bullets types.
4. Let’s suppose that even a crazy symbol isn’t custom enough for us. Exit the Symbol and the Customize dialogs, and then click the Picture button.
5. You can click one of the old-school images that ships with Office, but it’s more interesting to use your own image. Click the Import button (see Figure 3.6).
Figure 3.6 Click the Import button and select an image to use as a bullet.
6. Find your way to that picture of your face (or whatever image fits your purpose) and select it. You can use a picture of any format that PowerPoint supports.
What a great way to customize such a basic feature as bullet points and numbering.
AutoCorrect
AutoCorrect is another one of those Office features that everyone loves to hate. You’re happily typing some text into PowerPoint, and PowerPoint changes it into something else, thinking that it’s smarter than you are.
Fortunately, this feature is fairly customizable, and you can disable it completely if it annoys you. Bring up the AutoCorrect dialog by clicking the Office button and choosing PowerPoint Options (at the bottom). Click Proofing (on the left), and then AutoCorrect Options.
Default Text Corrections
You can change everything from whether “eyt” becomes “yet” to whether straight quotes become smart quotes. Many of the tabs in the AutoCorrect options are rare corner cases that will convert certain types of text you type into something else, so if you still want AutoCorrect on but find it wrong in certain cases, look for that specific case before you disable it altogether.
These options are shared between all Microsoft Office applications, so if you change it in PowerPoint, it applies in Word as well.
We both love AutoCorrect, though, and happily use it daily. Table 3.1 shows some of the corrections we rely on.
Table 3.1 AutoCorrect Defaults
Don’t forget; AutoCorrect also handles all of the grammar, spelling, and autocapitalization that we take for granted.
Tip
If AutoCorrect fixes something for you that you didn’t want to happen, simply Undo (Ctrl+Z), and it will go back to how you originally had it.
Creating Clickable Hyperlinks
Typing a URL (a web address) becomes a clickable URL, just as you find on websites:
But, there’s a problem if you have spaces in the URL. The AutoCorrect feature only converts the first part of the URL into an actual hyperlink that can be clicked. Just look at this:
http://waynekao.com/the first page.html
Luckily, there’s a workaround; to get spaces in a URL, simply surround it with angle braces (the “less than” and “greater than” symbols):
<http://www.waynekao.com/the first page.html>
Then press Enter or the spacebar, and voilà:
http://www.waynekao.com/the first page.html
Note that these hyperlinks are only clickable in slideshow mode, so don’t panic if you click on a link in default edit mode and nothing happens. Auto-hyperlink underlining can also be disabled by clicking the Office button and choosing PowerPoint Options. Click Proofing (in the left pane), and then AutoCorrect Options, AutoFormat As You Type. Uncheck the Internet and Network Paths with Hyperlinks box.
Tip
This hyperlink angle brace trick also works in Word and Outlook.
Adding Your Own Phrases
Beyond its traditional uses, AutoCorrect can also be used to automate typing of phrases that you type often. You can have “address” or “!address” or the word “addy” turn into your actual mailing address if you need to type it a lot or if your address is very long.
Pranks
Finally, AutoCorrect can be used to pull some great pranks. When your buddy leaves his computer unlocked, you can append words to his AutoCorrect list and really confuse him. Using opposite and intentional misspellings are the best (see Table 3.2).
Table 3.2 Fake AutoCorrect Entries Just For Fun
Understanding Tab Stops
Tabs stops are one of those features everyone has seen but few fully understand. Tab stops have been around since the days of the typewriter, and at a high level, they let you specify precisely what happens to your text after you press the Tab key.
Let’s first look at the ruler in PowerPoint, which is basically the holding tank for all the available Tab stops.
1. Start a new PowerPoint presentation.
2. Make sure that the Ruler is turned on by checking the View tab in the Show/Hide group to see that Ruler is selected.
3. Click into the content placeholder on your slide to make sure that you’re in text-editing mode. Notice how the sides of the ruler just darkened to draw attention to the editable text area.
4. Click on the ruler between inches 1 and 2. You should see something like the symbol shown in Figure 3.7. If you don’t see that symbol, continue clicking a few times until you do.
Figure 3.7 Notice the “L” shaped Tab stop inserted between inches 1 and 2.
Recognizing the Tab Symbols
Let’s now take a closer look at each of these tab symbols. There are five of them shown in Figure 3.8, which we’ll decrypt for you right here.
Figure 3.8 Let’s look at what each of these tab symbols means.
- Custom Tab Picker—Clicking this button cycles through all the available Tab stops, which are detailed in “Custom Tab Types” later in this chapter .After you have cycled to a Tab stop type that you want to insert, just click on the ruler and the currently selected Tab type will be inserted at that position. If you change your mind, you can drag the inserted Tab stop somewhere else on the ruler or drag the Tab stop off the ruler and release the mouse to delete the stop.
- First-Line Indent Marker—This specifies where you want the first line in a paragraph to be lined up. For a bulleted or numbered list, this specifies where the bullet or number appears.
- Left Indent Marker—This specifies where you want the second line in a paragraph to be lined up. For a bulleted or numbered list, this specifies where the text appears.
- Custom Tab Stop—This is a custom tab that you inserted using the Custom Tab Picker.
- Default Tab Stop—These faint gray lines are default Tab stops that PowerPoint creates for you. You can drag them around if you don’t like where they are.
Tip
All these skills are transferable to Microsoft Word, which has a nearly identical user interface for creating and using tabs.
Custom Tab Types
There are four custom tab types in PowerPoint:
Figure 3.9 Here are four custom tab types.
- Left tab—Text at this tab stop is left-aligned with the tab stop.
- Center tab—Ditto, but the text is center-aligned at the top.
- Right tab—Ditto again, but text is right-aligned such that the right edge of the text is flush with the Tab stop.
- Decimal tab—The decimal point of the text lines up with the Tab stop.
Shopping List Example
Okay, now let’s see some of this mumbo jumbo in action. Say that we want to list some purchase transactions in a text box, and we don’t want to use a table:
Notice how the decimal points of all the dollar amounts line up nicely. Here’s how you can join in on the fun:
1. Insert a new slide (Ctrl+M) in an open presentation and go to the second slide (see Figure 3.10).
Figure 3.10 Look at the tabs on the Ruler at the top of the slide.
2. Click into the large placeholder. Notice again how the sides of the ruler darkened after you clicked into the placeholder (see Figure 3.11).
Figure 3.11 The ruler is darkened to let you know that you are in text editing mode.
3. Let’s say that we want the decimal points to line up roughly where the 6 inch mark is on the ruler. Find the Custom Tab Picker (refer back to Figure 3.8) and click it until it shows the decimal Tab stop (shown previously in Figure 3.9). Notice how each click switches to a different Tab stop.
4. Now we want to insert the decimal Tab stop onto the ruler. Click the 6 inch mark on the ruler. Notice how the Tab stop symbol appears where you clicked.
5. Okay, now let’s start typing. Type PowerPoint. Press the Tab key and type $229.00. The decimal point in the “$229.00” lines up with the 6 inch mark on the ruler, just as we predicted (see Figure 3.12).
Figure 3.12 The numbers are centered around the decimal tab stop, which is where the decimal resides.
6. Now, you just need to type in the rest of the list. Press Enter to go to the beginning of the next line. Type PowerPoint book, press Tab, type $100.00, and then press Enter. For the last line, type 6-pack of TAB Soft Drink, press Tab, and then type $2.99.
Figure 3.13 shows the finished list.
Figure 3.13 See how nicely the numbers line up?
Tab Tips
Following is a list of tips to be aware of when working with tabs:
- To move a default Tab stop (symbol #5 in Figure 3.8), just drag it to the new location.
- When you’re adding or moving a Tab stop, hold the mouse button down, and you should see a temporary vertical dotted line from the Tab stop down. This line indicates where the tabbed text will be aligned when the Tab stop is placed.
- Inserting a new custom Tab stop, as we did in the shopping list example, removes all default Tab stops to its left.
- To remove a custom Tab stop, just drag it off the ruler, and it disappears.
- If you hold down the Ctrl key while dragging Tab stops around, the movement will be slower and you should be able to place the Tab stops more precisely.
- You can also set Tabs by selecting some text, right-clicking, and choosing Paragraph. Then, click the Tabs button.
Understanding Paragraph Formatting
Text is grouped into paragraphs, and it’s convenient and logical to format all words and letters in a paragraph together. Let’s take a look at how you can format paragraphs and save some time over formatting each word individually.
Paragraph Markers
Text formatting can throw you for a loop if you don’t have a solid understanding of paragraph markers.
A Word Detour
PowerPoint has no way to allow you to view paragraph markers, so let’s make a quick detour into Word 2007:
1. Launch Word. Click Start, All Programs, Microsoft Office, and then Microsoft Office Word 2007.
2. Open a Word document you have sitting around, or type a few paragraphs of text.
3. Now, let’s turn on paragraph markers. On the Home tab in the Paragraph group, click Show/Hide ¶. It’s the big ¶ symbol in the top right of that Ribbon group.
Whoa, now there are ¶ symbols at the end of every paragraph. What’s up with that? Well, those are paragraph markers.
Note
Early word processors, such as Microsoft Word, had paragraph markers turned on by default, which forced users to understand them. But, people kept complaining about weird symbols in their documents, so, a few releases back, Microsoft decided to hide them by default.
PowerPoint Paragraph Markers
Okay, back to PowerPoint. PowerPoint has paragraph markers too, but unlike Word, there’s no way to make them visible. But, there’s a space-like character at the end of each paragraph, which you can select (see Figure 3.14). This paragraph marker holds all the paragraph properties for that paragraph, essentially everything on the Home tab in the Paragraph group.
Figure 3.14 Select the space at the end of the paragraph to format the paragraph.
Here’s some paragraph marker–related behavior. This is all identical to behavior in Word:
- Creating a new paragraph copies the paragraph formatting from the previous paragraph marker to the new paragraph.
- Deleting a paragraph marker deletes all of that paragraph’s formatting and merges that text into the next paragraph, adopting the next paragraph’s paragraph formatting.
- If you copy text without copying the paragraph marker, the paragraph properties won’t be copy/pasted and your text adopts the target text’s paragraph settings. So, copy that paragraph marker at the end if you want paragraph properties copied over.
Paragraph behavior in previous versions of PowerPoint was not as well-defined, and there was no way to select the paragraph marker.
PowerPoint goes out of its way to try to do the right thing, so nine times out of ten, you won’t have to care about the paragraph marker and the right behavior will just happen. But remember your friend the paragraph marker the next time paragraph formatting is applied the way you expect.
Note
Just to make things more confusing, PowerPoint title placeholders are just one large paragraph. There’s no way to have different paragraph formatting for different parts of the title placeholder, and there’s only one paragraph marker per title placeholder to select.
Justify and Distributed
The Justify and Distributed alignment options give your text a clean look by aligning the text to both the left and right margins, as shown in Figure 3.15. You can find these options on the Home tab at the bottom left of the Paragraph group near the Columns drop down.
Figure 3.15 Justified and distributed text.
- Justify is the traditional setting that aligns text to both the left and right margins by adding spaces between words.
- Distributed is a newer setting that aligns text to both the left and right margins by adding spaces between letters. The Distributed option is not available to users who only use Latin languages such as English. To make the Distributed icon appear, click the Office button and choose PowerPoint Options. In the Popular section on the left, choose the Language Settings button and then add an Asian language such as Chinese. Restart PowerPoint.
Subtle Selection Handle Differences
Some commands do different things, depending on what editing mode you’re in. For example, if you have some text selected in a title placeholder (see Figure 3.16) and you press Delete, the text gets deleted, but the placeholder remains.
Figure 3.16 Here we have some text selected.
If you select the entire placeholder as shown in Figure 3.17, and then press Delete, the entire placeholder gets deleted.
Figure 3.17 Here we have the entire placeholder selected.
Aside from the text cursor, do you notice the difference between those two screenshots? In Figure 3.16, the selection handle consists of dotted lines. This means that we’re in text-editing mode. In Figure 3.17, the selection is solid, indicating that we’re in shape-editing mode.
Note
In previous versions of PowerPoint, the border is much thicker, but there’s still a difference: Text selections had diagonal lines and shape selections had a dotted line.
Look for these subtle changes in the handles whenever you’re trying to figure out what’s selected.
Tip
You can exit from text-editing mode into shape-editing mode by pressing the Esc key.
Text Formatting for Placeholders and Shapes
Although many believe that text operations such as bold and italic can only be applied to text, you can apply these operations to other PowerPoint objects as well. This section discusses performing text operations to placeholders and shapes.
Formatting Text Placeholders
Text formatting isn’t just for text selections. It can be applied to placeholders as well, which affects any text typed into the placeholder after the formatting is applied. For example:
1. Create a new presentation (Ctrl+N).
2. Select the title placeholder. You want a shape selection, not a text selection, so make sure that the selection border is not dotted (see the section, “Subtle Selection Handle Differences,” earlier in this chapter).
3. Click on the bold button from the Home tab (or press Ctrl+B). Notice how the prompt text becomes bold.
4. Click into the placeholder and type—the new text becomes bold.
Formatting Shapes
Placeholder text formatting works on shapes too:
1. Insert a circle from the Insert tab on the Shapes group by choosing a circle shape and then clicking somewhere on the slide.
2. Select the inserted circle.
3. Click on the bold button on the Home tab (or press Ctrl+B).
4. Type text into the circle and the text becomes bold.
Formatting Placeholders on the Master
So far, formatting placeholders is somewhat of a novelty, but this is actually useful for placeholders on the master.
1. Go to the slide master by choosing the View tab and clicking Slide Master on the Presentation Views group.
2. Select the title placeholder on the Master Slide.
3. Underline the text by clicking the Underline button on the Home tab or by pressing Ctrl+U.
4. Let’s go crazy and apply a 3D bevel, too. On the Format tab in the WordArt Styles group, choose Text Effects, 3-D Rotation, and select your favorite effect.
5. Return to normal view by clicking the Close Master View button on the ribbon (the big red X). Notice that the placeholder now includes the underline and 3D formatting you applied.
6. Just to prove that this works, click into the placeholder and type. Notice how the text takes on the underline and the 3D formatting.
7. Create a new slide (Ctrl+M). Notice how the placeholder is formatted here, too.
This is neat because it means that you can go to the master, apply text formatting to the master placeholders, and have it apply to all the placeholders in the presentation.
Clear All Formatting
Ever want to just strip out all the crazy formatting on a piece of text to make it simple, plain text? Just select the text, and click the Home tab, Font group, Clear All Formatting button. It looks like an eraser, and it’s at the top right of the ribbon group. Note that this does not clear any formatting applied via the Master or Layout that the text inherits from.
Transformed Text
If you’ve been to a cheap restaurant, a garage sale, or a flea market, you have probably seen Office WordArt, which are predefined transformed text effects. PowerPoint 2007 has even more WordArt-like effects, which you can use to make text really stand out. Figure 3.18 shows a gallery of text transform effects. As we mentioned before, in PowerPoint 2007, these effects can be applied to any text in PowerPoint because there is no distinction between WordArt and regular text.
Figure 3.18 PowerPoint 2007 has a large collection of warped text effects from which you can choose.
Warping
Transformed text is another way of saying warped text or vector text because you can change the way the words are arranged and make them follow a certain pattern.
As with all things, use this in moderation. A great use of Text Transforms is using it to make your slide titles stand out or for a large sign. Please don’t go around making your figure captions warped, or it will seem overplayed like a song on the radio. Serious content should be normal and non-transformed, but if you want to make a point or emphasize some words, transform away!
For example, if you want to make your text look like the Star Wars credits (without the animation), you can select the Fade Up Transform Effect:
1. Type some text, and then select it.
2. On the Format tab in the Text Effects group, choose Transform.
3. Scroll down to the bottom, and select the object that says Fade Up in the ScreenTip. The text now resembles what is shown in Figure 3.19.
Figure 3.19 You can make your text look exciting by using a Transform effect and making your text flow the way that you want it to.
Follow Path
The Follow Path Transforms, which are located above the Warp Effects, are good for making text look bannered. These are applied exactly the same as Warp Effects are.
Inline Editing
WordArt editing in previous versions of PowerPoint entailed typing unstyled text into a dialog box, clicking OK, and then seeing what you typed appear as WordArt. New to PowerPoint 2007, all this editing occurs inline, which means that you type directly into the transformed text instead of inside a separate box. You also get to see the results immediately without having to click a button.
If you edit a word that has a Text Transform applied to it, notice that the cursor will be modified in the way that your text is! Not only that, but if you have a misspelled word, the red line underneath the word becomes warped too (see Figure 3.20).
Figure 3.20 The spelling error indicator line also gets transformed!
PowerPoint 2007’s Proofing Tools
When we were in high school, it was common to use a dictionary to check your spelling, a thesaurus to find word synonyms, and a foreign language dictionary to painfully translate words between languages. Those days are long behind us.
Table 3.3 shows some of the awesome proofing tools that are built into PowerPoint and other Office applications. You will find them on the Review tab in the Proofing group.
Table 3.3 Built-in Proofing Tools
Note
In case you’re wondering, PowerPoint doesn’t do grammar checking, only Word and Outlook do. Few strive for perfect grammar when throwing together some presentation bullet points, so PowerPoint doesn’t bother badgering you about your bad grammar.
Translation
We’ll briefly touch on translation here because it’s easily the coolest of the four proofing services.
Sometimes you receive presentations with words in a foreign language. Just select the foreign word, go to the Review tab in the Proofing group, and click Translate. Choose the language you’re translating to and what language you’re translating from. Follow the instructions to install the appropriate dictionary, if it’s not already installed.
Note
This was more convenient in previous versions of Office. You could just hold down the Alt key and click the word you wanted to translate to open the Research pane. Because of a bug, this no longer works in PowerPoint 2007.
Spell Checking and Thesaurus
In the Proofing group of the Review tab, you’ll also find the spell checker (under Spelling) and the thesaurus (under Thesaurus).
Even though it’s as easy as pressing the F7 key to start the spell checker, all recent versions of Office make spell-checking and grammar-checking so easy that you don’t even need to activate it at all. PowerPoint checks spelling as you type and underlines spelling mistakes in red.
Note
Word 2007 uses green underlines to show grammatical errors and blue underlines to show words that are spelled correctly but probably misspelled in the current context, such as “Jeff bought a pear of shoes” or “Wayne kept loosing his mind.” Neither of these features is supported by PowerPoint 2007.
To use the thesaurus, highlight a word, right-click it, and PowerPoint shows a list of possible corrections to choose from. Choose a word from that list to use that correction.
Proofing Example
Let’s walk through a quick example that shows many of PowerPoint’s neat proofing capabilities:
1. In a new presentation, type “I am teh best” in the title placeholder. AutoCorrect automatically changes “teh” into “the,” which is one way that PowerPoint prevents you from typing misspelled text. You can read more about AutoCorrect earlier in this chapter.
2. Okay, we’re demonstrating something here, so manually change “the” back to “teh” and move the text cursor over to “best.” Notice how PowerPoint underlines the word in red to show you that it’s misspelled.
3. To correct it, right-click “teh.” PowerPoint shows a list of recommended replacement words (as shown in Figure 3.21), and you can choose “the” to correct the spelling.
Figure 3.21 Right-clicking a misspelled word shows a list of correctly spelled similar words.
4. Now, let’s say that we’re putting this in an important presentation and we want a more refined word than “best.” Right-click “best” and go to the Synonyms menu. This shows you a list of words that mean the same thing as “best” (see Figure 3.22). You can now choose a cooler word such as “preeminent.”
Figure 3.22 Right-clicking a word and going to Synonyms shows a list of similar words.
5. Select “preeminent” and go to the Review tab in the Proofing group and click Translate. This brings up the Research pane that shows you the definition of the word, or you can choose to translate “preeminent” to another language (see Figure 3.23).
Figure 3.23 The Research pane can be used to look up word definitions, synonyms/antonyms, and for translation to and from other languages.
What the Random?
Though we all like to believe that we focus on content first and worry about the look of the presentation afterward, sometimes we want to format the presentation without having any content.
To create some dummy text to insert, you might be tempted to bang on the keyboard. Fortunately, the development team at Microsoft cares about your poor keyboard and has an easier solution. Just type =rand(3) and press Enter. You can substitute another number for 3, which corresponds to the number of paragraphs you want to insert. The text that’s inserted varies depending on which language version of PowerPoint you’re using, but in U.S. English, I get this:
This trick also works in Word. Excel’s =rand() function gives you a random real number between 0 and 1.
Shortcut Keys for Newbies and Experts
To really use PowerPoint with great speed, learning to use shortcuts is essential. Learning just a couple of keyboard shortcuts will save you time in the long run, especially if you’re working with text a lot. Basic and advanced keyboard shortcuts are shown in Table 3.4 and Table 3.5. Start with the basic ones first if you’re new to shortcut keys. Mouse shortcuts are shown in Table 3.6.
Table 3.4 Basic Keyboard Shortcuts
Table 3.5 Advanced Keyboard Shortcuts
Table 3.6 Mouse shortcuts
