There is no doubt in the fact that PowerPoint is the most popular and well-established software to create awesome presentations. It’s being widely used for personal and business purposes. Thanks to the availability of a rich selection of in-app tools and features, you can create absolutely unique and eye-catching slides.
Your presentation will have a more outstanding look if you create it with popular PowerPoint templates. As a rule, such ready-made solutions include rich sets of ready-made slides and customization options, which are intended to let you build absolutely versatile presentations. Working with the best PowerPoint templates, you increase the chances that your message will stick to people’s minds.
There are many elements making up a decent PowerPoint presentation. This includes the structure of your slides, visual content, animation and transition effects between slides, and texts, of course. PowerPoint gives you a wide range of opportunities to manage texts in your presentations.
Text Effects in PowerPoint
PowerPoint text effects let you achieve a number of purposes that you pursue. You can bring extra emphasis to the key points of your slides, make your data easy to read for your audience, create bullet lists, show charts, timelines, etc.
Some of the most popular text effects in PowerPoint are:
Text highlights
Curving text
Text wrap
Text outline
Scrolling text
Animated text
Table of contents
In-text citations
By means of such simple text effects, you can make a really striking PowerPoint presentation that will engage your audience with captivating storytelling. Let’s see how each of them works and bring a more striking look to your slides.
Text Highlights
To bring special emphasis to certain pieces of your data, PowerPoint has the text highlight feature. With its help, you can highlight the most important phrases or passages in your slides. This lets you make your text more readable and easier to scan.
When you need to highlight some pieces of text, keep stick to the following instructions:
Navigate Insert > Text Box.
Next, choose the slide and the piece of text that you want to highlight.
Draw a text box around a word, phrase or passage.
Navigate Drawing Tools > Format.
In the Shape Style section, choose Shape Fill.
Pick the color for text highlight.
You can also highlight text in your PowerPoint presentation using the Glow Text effect. To use it, take on the following steps:
Choose a word or piece of text that you want to highlight.
In the Drawing Tools, choose the Format tab.
Click Text Effects > Glow.
Select the glow variation that fits the style of your presentation.
Curving Text
One more way to add a more appealing look to your presentation is by applying a curving effect to your text. Here is how you can do this:
Navigate Insert > WordArt.
Pick the WordArt style that you like.
Enter your text.
Select the WordArt text.
Navigate Drawing Tools > Format > WordArt Styles.
Click Text Effects > Transform and select any style that you enjoy.
Text Wrap
Your PowerPoint presentation will have a more balanced look if you wrap your texts around images. By doing so, you can also save space on your slides and deliver a more comprehensive style to your slides.
To wrap texts around images, take on the following steps:
Click on the picture around which you want to wrap your text.
Navigate Home > Arrange > Send to Back.
Insert your text over the image.
Put the cursor in the upper left corner of the picture.
Use the spacebar to create a visual break in the text.
Use the spacebar to align the text on both sides.
Repeat the action for each line.
Text Outline
If you want to outline some words or lines in your presentation, here is what you will need to do:
Select the text.
Navigate to the Format tab.
Click WordArt Styles > Text Outline.
Pick the color and click on Weight.
Click on Text Fill in order to outline your text.
Scrolling Text
You can make your Powerpoint presentation look unusual and more engaging while adding the scrolling effect to your text. It’s easier to add this text effect then you think. Simply take the following steps:
Add text to the text box.
Click on the text box and choose Animation.
Find the More Animations section and click on it.
Choose More Entrance Effects and select Credits.
Go to the Preview mode to check if the scrolling effect works properly on your slides.
Animated Text
In addition to the scrolling effect, you can animate texts in your slides.
Choose a piece of text that you’d like to animate.
Go to the Animations tab.
Choose the animation style you like the best.
Check out the animation in the Preview mode.
Table of Contents
If you have lots of slides in your presentation, then it would be easier and quicker to navigate it using a table of contents. This can be done easily:
Make a slide for your table of contents.
Copy all the titles of the slides in your presentation and paste them on the slide.
Create hyperlinks to the slides.
You can also use the dedicated Agenda feature from Power-user to create and update agenda pages automatically.
In-text Citations
Citations can make you sound like a real expert in your field. You can cite some well-known and respective authors right on the slides of your presentation.
When you decide to add citations, keep in mind there are two citation styles used in PowerPoint presentations - Modern Language Association (MLA) and American Psychological Association (APA).
When using the Modern Language Association format, you need to use the brackets for your citation:
“Quote” (Surname page number).
Using the American Psychological Association style, you will need to include the author’s name, the page number of the publication you are citing, and the year of publication:
Surname (year) "quote" (p. 1)
Conclusion
For many years PowerPoint remains the most popular software to create striking presentations for business purposes, educational matters or just for fun. It’s easy to use even by a kid. However, the availability of more advanced tools and features make it the perfect choice for making high-quality professional slides. I bet that you have already worked with it many times. Still, there are lots of impressive techniques that you can master to make your presentation more engaging. Begin with the text.