Office 2007: The Missing Manual

Chapter 20.  Formatting and Laying Out Your Slides

In the previous chapter, you learned how to massage text into perfectly indented paragraphs, columns, and lists. Now it’s time for the big picture. This chapter shows you how to format slides using layouts, and how to reapply a theme (see Choosing a Theme for Your Presentation) or color scheme (a list of coordinating font colors). Finally—and most important when you’re in a time crunch—you’ll learn how to turn on PowerPoint’s automatic formatting options.

Changing Slide Layout

Each time you create a slide—by creating a new presentation, or by adding a slide to an existing presentation—PowerPoint gives that slide a layout such as the Title Slide layout, with one title text placeholder near the top and one subtitle text placeholder near the middle of the slide. But you can change the layout of your slide at any time, either before you’ve added content to it or after. PowerPoint gives you several options for changing slide layout:

• Apply canned layouts to your slides. You can tell PowerPoint to put a title at the top of a slide and two content placeholders (for text, pictures, and so on) side-by-side in the body of the slide.

• Change orientation. You can change a landscape orientation (where the slide’s wider than it is tall) to a portrait orientation (where the slide’s taller than it is wide).

• Reposition elements. You can drag text boxes and other objects (such as pictures) around on your slide to reposition them. ...