Hello again and welcome to this second section on working with text in PowerPoint 2013.
In the previous section, we looked at some of the basic formatting of text and we talked
a little about placeholder textboxes.
In this section, I’d like to tell you a little bit more about textboxes and the different
types that are available and look at some of the other type of formatting we can do
and what we can do in terms of text effects.
So let’s get started.
So let’s start another blank presentation.
There’s a straightforward keyboard shortcut for that.
It’s Control-N. And with the blank presentation, as we saw before, you get a title slide with
two placeholders on it.
Now it’s very important to recognize that when we’re working with any kind of template
including this default one, the placeholders on it, the text placeholders in this case
are positioned in a consistent way.
If I wanted to put on a new slide and I chose title and content, it gives me Slide 2.
Do the same thing again, new slide, gives me Slide 3.
Within each slide as I select it, I have placeholders that are accurately positioned based on a
template.
And we’ll talk more about templates, layouts, and outlines later on in the course.
If when I get these I select those placeholders and start changing the size of them and I
start, for instance, making that one a bit smaller, maybe making that one a bit bigger,
then I’m going to change the overall consistency within a presentation.
And the basic idea behind the slides in a template and the placeholder shapes on those
is to give consistency throughout a presentation.
So if I was doing one such as the one we looked at earlier talking about the tabs on the Ribbon
of PowerPoint 2013, having developed each slide from a template slide means that the
positioning, sizing, and so on is consistent.
So it’s a good idea to avoid resizing placeholders too much within a presentation.
However, sometimes you need text where there isn’t a placeholder textbox.
And in this situation, you have to use a different type of textbox.
Now this different type of textbox behaves in a different way to the placeholder textboxes
but also they have many features in common as well.
On this occasion, I’m going to add a slide to this presentation which is completely blank
and if I click on a blank slide there is no placeholder.
There’s no where to put some text.
So in order to put some text here, we’re going to insert a textbox and on the Insert
tab in the Text Group, one of the options is Textbox.
Now this draws a textbox anywhere.
In order to draw this textbox, we click that button and as you move the cursor over the
slide, the cursor changes to become a vertical line with the little sort of cross at the
bottom.
It looks like something like a sword upside down, and you basically draw the textbox.
Now don’t be too confused by the size of that box at the moment.
But the first thing you must do is type something.
This is a manual textbox.
And a manual textbox behaves in a very different way to a placeholder textbox.
First of all, as you may have noticed there, it automatically resizes itself vertically
to make space for what’s in it.
It doesn’t resize itself horizontally, only vertically.
The placeholder textbox, if you remember, was of a fixed size and you could change that
size by dragging the handles, but the thing that the placeholder textbox will do automatically
is to change the font size to fit the text into the box.
The manual textbox in a way works the other way around.
It adjusts its own size to fit the text.
So if I selected, say, the words Manual, A manual textbox, went in and changed the font
size from 18 point to 80 point it automatically changes the height of the box.
It doesn’t automatically change the width.
You can change that manually.
But if you tried to change the height of it manually, it doesn’t change the font size,
what actually happens is it refuses to do it.
It insists on fitting the text inside itself.
So there we have the very important distinction between those two types of textbox.
Now I’m really over simplifying here but let me just outline what the situation is.
When you’re working on a presentation and you want to line up text, headings, content,
everything to be neatly aligned and standard throughout a presentation, try to stick to
the placeholder textboxes.
By the way, you can create your own placeholder textboxes, but more of that later.
But if you need a textbox to do a particular thing in a particular place that maybe is
a little bit different from the standard, it’s not part of the template, you’re
maybe labeling a bit of a diagram, something like that, then insert a manual textbox.
But in both cases be aware of how each textbox works and the sort of thing that it can do.
Having said that the fundamental features of a manual textbox in terms of many of the
things we need to do are just the same as they are for a placeholder textbox and I just
want to run over one or two of those again.
So here I have a manual textbox.
If I select part of the text, say, three letters and go to the Home tab, the Font Group, I
can for instance change the color of just those three.
If I click within the text, say, between the U and the A in Manual so that I can a flashing
cursor there and press the Delete key, I would delete the character to the right of the cursor.
If I select the whole textbox, so I click on the outline so that the outline of the
textbox, the border becomes a continuous line and go to the Font Group on the Home tab and
change the font size to 24, it will apply to everything within the box.
It applies to the whole box because I had the whole box selected.
Similarly if I press the Delete key when I’ve got the whole box selected, I will delete
the whole textbox.
So there we are.
So they’re important things to remember about the difference between selecting a textbox
and having a selection inside a textbox.
Now I’d just like to show you one other thing in this section related to text.
Let’s insert a textbox although this will equally work in a placeholder textbox, and
what I’m going to do is to insert a special symbol.
Supposing I want to put the character Pi in there; click on the Insert tab and in the
Symbols Group on the right there is a button Symbol.
Now this gives access to a set of special symbols that we can insert.
It’s a very extensive range of symbols and if I want to find the Pi symbol, it’s actually
here on the right.
There’s a list of recently used symbols if you’ve got a new installation of PowerPoint
this will be setup with a sort of default recently used set, but as you use your installation
of PowerPoint, that will get updated.
So let’s have the Pi character there, click on Insert, click on Close, and I’ve got
a Pi character in there now.
And also you can insert equations.
Now inserting equations is outside the scope of this course but worth knowing that you
can do it.
There are also a number of other options associated with text such as inserting headers and footers,
inserting WordArt, and a couple of other things that we can do.
One or two of those we’re going to come back to later in the course.
They’re special cases of text and I’m going to fit them into the appropriate parts
of the course material.
So that’s it on working with text at the moment.
As I said, we’ll be coming back to some special cases of text later in the course,
but for now I’ll see in the next section.