Fonts are more than just pretty typefaces although even your choice of typefaces can have a profound effect on how readable your text is to the
audience. We have already explored how you can
format font styles to make your text bold, italicized,
underlined, etc. Beyond these basic offerings, PowerPoint 2010's Font dialog box offers some advanced format options for selected
text. You can still change the font type, set the font size, color, and other font attributes in this dialog box, and you can also do more.
In this tutorial, we'll explore the font format options within the Font dialog box in
PowerPoint 2010 for Windows:
- Open any presentation and select the text you want to format, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Text selected on the slide
- With the text still selected (refer to Figure 1, above), access the Home tab of the
Ribbon, and locate the Font group. Within this group, click
the dialog launcher, as highlighted in red within Figure 2.
Figure 2: Dialog launcher within the Font group
-
Alternatively, you can right-click the selected text to bring up a contextual menu and select the Font option from contextual menu,
as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Font option selected
- Either way you end up summoning the two-tabbed Font dialog box, as shown in Figure 4.
Make sure that the Font tab is selected. We explore options within the Character Spacing tab in our
Character Spacing in PowerPoint 2010 tutorial.
Figure 4: Font dialog box
-
All the options within the Font dialog box are explained below, as marked Figure 4, above:
A. Latin text font
- Click the downward pointing arrow to bring up a list of installed fonts, as
shown in Figure 5 below. Note that the top two fonts named +Heading and +Body are
from the active
Theme Fonts set. Choose any font typeface available within
Latin text font list. Alternatively, you can directly type the name of the font within
the Latin text font box. Typing the first few alphabets of your font name should work.
Figure 5: Font typeface drop-down list
B. Font style
- This option also bring up a drop-down list from where you can choose a font style such as Bold,
Italics, etc. for your selected text (see Figure 6 below).
Figure 6: Font style drop-down list
C. Size
- Use the up or down arrows to increase or decrease the font size. Also you can directly type in the font size
value within the Size box.
D. Font color
- Changes color of selected text.
E. Underline style
- PowerPoint offers 16 underline styles for text, such as: single line, wavy line, etc. (see
Figure 7 below).
Figure 7: Underline style drop-down list
F. Underline color
- Here you can select a color for the underline. Note that this option will be only active when
underline style is applied to the text.
G. Effects
- This section provides seven effects for selected text. Select any of the Effects check-box to
apply it to the selected text. Figure 8 shows all the results of applying all these effects.
Figure 8: Text Effects - Once the options are choosen, click the OK button within the Font dialog box.
- This will apply the changes to the text within the slide, as shown in Figure 9
(compare it with Figure 1, above).
Figure 9: Text formatting changed
- Save your presentation often.
