Format Text Attributes Within the Mini Toolbar in PowerPoint 2010

Text in PowerPoint presentation needs to be edited in many ways -- sometimes you need certain words to be in a different color, or even bold, italics, or underlined. Whatever the option required to format your text, you'll find that the Mini Toolbar is a great location to do these changes easily -- it really saves you from dragging your cursor repeatedly to the Ribbon area since it pops up right next to the selected text that you want to format. Follow these steps to explore more:

1. Navigate to any slide in your presentation that has some text content, as shown in Figure 1.
   
   
   Figure 1: Open presentation with a textual slide
   
   
2. Click inside the text placeholder and select the text by dragging the cursor across a line of text (see Figure 2) -- see Selecting and Changing Text to learn more about text selection techniques.
   
   
   Figure 2: Text selected within the text placeholder
   
   
3. Now, right-click the selected text to open the context menu, as shown in Figure 3. Just above this context menu, you will find the Mini Toolbar (highlighted in red see in Figure 3). This small interface is chock-a-block with text formatting options.
   
   
   Figure 3: Mini toolbar
   
   
4. All options within the Mini Toolbar are exactly same as the ones you encounter in the Font and Paragraph groups on the Home tab of the Ribbon -- it's just that having access to all these options next to your selected text saves your wrist from the wear and tear of scrolling to the Ribbon!
   
   
   Tip: You cannot see the Mini Toolbar when you right-click selected text? Look here to explore how you can get your Mini Toolbar back.
   
   The text formatting options within the Mini Toolbar are explained below:
   
   
   Figure 4: Text formatting options within Mini toolbar
   
   
   1. Font: Click the down arrow to the right of the font name to open the drop-down font list, and select a new font. You can also type the first few characters of a font name right within the box to access a font quickly -- for example you can type "Ver" to get to Verdana quickly.
      
      
   2. Font Size: Click to get a drop-down list of font sizes. You can also type a new point size in the size text box.
      
      
   3. Increase Font Size/Decrease Font Size: Use these options to increase or decrease the font size respectively.
      
      
   4. Decrease List Level/Increase List Level: Use the Decrease List Level (Promote) to convert selected text to a higher indented level in the list. Similarly, use the Increase List Level (Demote) to convert selected text to a lower indented level.
      
      
   5. Bring Forward/Send Backward: These two arrange buttons helps you reorder the slide objects. When these options are used on selected text, it actually reorders the text container (text placeholder, text box, or shape). Learn more about reordering.
      
      
   6. Font Style: Choose to make your selected text Bold and/or Italic -- these are toggle buttons, so if your text is already bold, then clicking the Bold button will unbold it -- Italics works in the same way.
      
      
   7. Align Text: Align the selected text to left, center, or right.
      
      
   8. Font Color: Changes the font color. Click the down arrow next to the button to bring up a Color gallery to get more choices for font color.
      
      
   9. Shape Fill: Apply a solid fill to the text container (text placeholder, text box, or shape). Clicking the down arrow next to this button brings up the shape fill drop-down gallery with more fill options.Learn more about fills for shapes in PowerPoint 2010.
      
      
   10. Shape Outline: Applies an outline to the text container (text placeholder, text box, or shape). Click the down arrow next to this button to bring up the Shape Outline drop-down gallery to get more formatting options. Learn more about formatting outlines for shapes in PowerPoint 2010.
       
       
   11. Format Painter: Copies the text attributes from the selected text or text container (text placeholder, text box, or shape). But, if you use Format Painter on a text container having different text attributes, it copies the formatting of only the first word in that text container. Learn more about Copying Text Attributes With Format Painter in PowerPoint 2010.