Changing the Alignment, Spacing, Size, and Look of Text 439
Tip If you turn off AutoFit so that you can manually size text, you have two ways to
adjust the size of placeholders to fit their text: by manually dragging the handles around
a selected placeholder, or by clicking Resize Shape To Fit Text on the Text Box page of
the Format Shape dialog box. For information about AutoFit, see “Correcting and Sizing
Text While Typing” in Chapter 14, “Work with Slide Text.”
● Style Apply attributes such as bold, italic, underlining, and shadow and strike-
through effects to selected characters.The character style buttons.Keyboard Shortcut Press Ctrl+B to make text bold, Ctrl+I to make it italic, or Ctrl+U to
underline it.
● Color Change the color of the selected characters by clicking the Font Color
arrow and then clicking the color you want in the palette.
● Case Change the capitalization of the words—for example, you can change small
letters to capital letters—by clicking the Change Case button and then clicking the
case you want.
● Character spacing Increase or decrease the space between the letters in a selec-
tion by clicking the Character Spacing button and then clicking the option you
want. You can also click More Spacing to display the Character Spacing page of the
Font dialog box, where you can specify spacing more precisely.
Tip You can clear all manually applied character formatting from a selection by clicking the
Clear All Formatting button.
To make it quick and easy to apply the most common paragraph and character format-
ting, PowerPoint displays the Mini Toolbar when you make a text selection. This toolbar
contains the same buttons you’ll find in the Font and Paragraph groups on the Home
tab, but they’re all in one place, adjacent to the selection. If you don’t want to apply any
of the Mini Toolbar formats, you can simply ignore it, and it will disappear.The Mini Toolbar.After you have formatted the text on a slide, you might find that you want to adjust the
way lines break to achieve a more balanced look. This is often the case with slide titles,
but bullet points and regular text can sometimes also benefit from a few manually
inserted line breaks. You can simply press Shift+Enter to insert a line break at the cursor.