What's the worst feature in PowerPoint?
This question can launch some very animated and heated conversations.
There's a reason why we hear a phrase "Death by PowerPoint." But of all the good
and bad features in PowerPoint, I think the worst one is AutoFit.
Let's look at how you can improve your PowerPoint presentations and be more
effective by simply changing one option.
The AutoFit feature in PowerPoint is actually designed to intentionally,
on purpose ,shrink the size of lengthy slide titles and bullet text as more and
larger amounts of texts is added to a slide.
Now the reality is AutoFit encourages too much text on a slide.
So for this bullet slide, it's actually readable.
It doesn't have too many items.
The size of the text fits what was laid out within the Slide Master,
but with AutoFit turned on, we're more likely to see slides like this.
So the title is actually smaller in size and the bullets are significantly
smaller with way too much text.
So the reality is AutoFit encourages way too much text on a slide.
Even though some of the top complaints from audiences of PowerPoint
presentations are that the slides are packed with text and the text is too small
to read. So even though it is a default feature in PowerPoint,
AutoFit reinforces terrible habits and slide design by allowing texts that's too
small for presentation and allowing too much text.
You can actually work with AutoFit directly from the text.
It just might not be very obvious. As you might be adding the text.,
there is a Smart Tag that pops up and it's pretty subtle,
but it's in the corner here.
So this is AutoFit Options and this includes the options to stop fitting the
text, splitting the text between two slides,
continuing on a new slide or changing the two columns. Now,
we always want to kind of back up and decide too that maybe we don't need that
much content. Are there ways to streamline the text?
So it might not just be breaking the text into two different slides that are the
ways to simplify it.
What would happen if we pick Stop Fitting Text to This Placeholder?
Now we see that we really do have too much,
so this brings the text back to the defaults that are set within the Slide
Master which makes it pretty clear that we have way too much information.
We can also turn off this feature from this Smart Tag under the feature Control
AutoCorrect Options,
but there's another way to get to this as well and that is by picking File >
Options
and then Proofing.
You might be more familiar with Proofing for spelling and grammar,
but it also includes AutoCorrect Options.
From here we move to, if necessary, the AutoFormat As You Type
tab and this is where you might see some answers to why your text sometimes
changes. For instance, straight quotes to smart quotes.
Our focus though is to turn off AutoFit title text to placeholder and AutoFit
body text to placeholder.
Rather than needing to remember to make that adjustment,
let's not even let it happen in the first place.
And maybe you're not the offender, perhaps it's a colleague or your boss.
How can you encourage them to make these changes as well.
Even though it's a default,
let's turn off AutoFit so that you can create more effective,
easier to read text slides. For other PowerPoint tips,
head to TheSoftwarePro.com/PowerPoint and
subscribe to this channel for more tips. This is Dawn Bjork, The Software Pro.
Thanks for watching.