One of the hallmarks of a good presentation is consistency in look and feel. If there are elements you want to use consistently from slide to slide, such as a company logo, Masters can help you avoid having to add them again and again, slide after slide.
If you have selected a Theme for your slides, a set of font styles and colors have already been applied, but sometimes you may want to modify those styles or format a portion of the text for emphasis.
Placing a picture, a piece of line art, or a drawing on a slide helps you add some interest to your slides, but it’s important that you make the object fit into your overall design. That may mean resizing or rotating the object to fit better with other elements on the slide, or modifying the color or brightness of the image to match your slide color scheme.
Finally, it may be useful to group objects that you insert on your slide so you can move or modify them as one object, or to set an order for objects so that one appears on top of another if they overlap.
In this chapter you explore the many ways you can format text and objects in PowerPoint, as well as resizing, rotating, grouping, and ordering those objects.
Fonts are design styles for text, and they add a distinct personality to your slide contents. Some fonts are playful, others are traditional, and still others are great for adding emphasis. The trick to choosing the right font for a presentation is to make sure it fits the design mood of your slides, and that it is readable by your audience in whatever setting you will show your presentation.
Click the arrow on the Font field.Tip
The fonts you see on the font list are those that come installed in Office 2007. You can find additional font sets online, some free and some that you have to pay for. Visit the Microsoft Typography Web site at www.microsoft.com/typography/default.mspx to learn more about fonts and find additional font sets.
Move your mouse cursor down the list of fonts. Each font is previewed on the selected text in turn as you move your mouse through the list.
Try This!
You can also use the Font dialog box to change the font; however, there is no preview of the font appearance using this method. Click the dialog launcher icon in the Font group of tools on the Home tab to open the dialog box and click the arrow in the Latin Text Font drop-down list to display the font list. Choose the font you want and then click OK to apply it. The main benefit to using the Font dialog box is the ability to apply several formatting settings, such as size, font, and a bold effect, at one time.