Tips for Working with Bulleted Text Objects

Published: April 1, 1997

Inside Microsoft PowerPoint
A Publication of The Cobb Group

With a little know-how, you can make bulleted text objects you create manually look as nice as ones you create using a bulleted auto-layout.

PowerPoint offers a number of built-in layouts that you can use to add bulleted text to a slide. Sometimes, however, there isn't a built-in bulleted layout that's exactly what you need. So, you probably just enter the text, select the text object, and click the Bullet On/Off button to create a bulleted text object.

PowerPoint's built-in bulleted layouts automatically apply certain formats to the text paragraphs:

• ample space between the bullet and text

• an indent preceding second and subsequent lines of text

• a smidgen of extra vertical spacing between bulleted paragraphs

If you don't use one of the built-in layouts to create bulleted text, you have to take care of these formatting chores yourself. Figure A shows two slides that contain bulleted text objects.

Figure A: Bulleted autolayouts (top) include built-in space formatting, which you must apply yourself to text blocks you create with the Text Tool.

In the first slide, we used PowerPoint's Bulleted List autolayout. In the second, we typed the text using the Text Tool and then applied the bullets using the Bullet On/Off button.

Fortunately, the methods for applying space formatting to bulleted text objects are quick and easy to use. Unfortunately, they aren't intuitive. In this article, we'll show you how to "clean up" bulleted paragraphs, like the ones shown at the bottom of Figure A. Incidentally, you can also use these methods to alter the built-in formatting included in the bulleted autolayouts.

Adding space and indenting the text

Luckily, there's a one-step process that will add space between the bullet and text and indent the second line of text. Before you begin, display the PowerPoint rulers by choosing Ruler from the View menu. Next, click inside the text object to display the text rulers, which measure only the currently selected text object. Figure B shows the horizontal text ruler with its parts labeled.

Figure B: You can set a text object's indents on the horizontal text ruler.

When you're working with text like ours where the bullet is in the left margin and the indented text block has a flush-left margin—you use the first-line indent marker () to move the bullet and the left indent marker () to move the entire paragraph of text. With this in mind, place the cursor over the left indent marker and drag it about 3/8 inch to the right, as we've done in Figure C.

Figure C: Drag the left indent marker to drag the entire paragraph of text away from the bullet.

As you drag the indent marker, PowerPoint displays a thin dotted line showing the marker's current position. (This line is faintly visible in Figure C.) When you release the mouse button, PowerPoint drops the paragraph with its left margin at the current position of the left indent marker. That's all there is to indenting bulleted text.

Setting the amount of space between bulleted paragraphs

As you can see in Figure A, the autolayout text includes a bit—specifically 0.2 lines—of space between each paragraph. This space helps you visually distinguish each bullet point. You can control the amount of space between bulleted paragraphs by using the Line Spacing command on the Format menu. Issuing this command opens the Line Spacing dialog box, shown in Figure D.

Figure D: You control the amount of space between paragraphs by changing settings in this dialog box.

Before we change any settings in this dialog box, let's take a closer look at what the settings control. The Line Spacing setting dictates the amount of space between individual lines in a paragraph as well as the minimum amount of space between paragraphs. The Before Paragraph setting controls the amount of space added above the selected paragraph (in addition to the amount contributed by the Line Spacing setting). The After Paragraph setting establishes the amount of space added below the selected paragraph (in addition to the amount supplied by the Line Spacing setting).

Generally, a Line Spacing setting of 1 gives you "single-spaced text." A paragraph setting of 1 on top of the Line Spacing setting of 1 gives you "double-spaced text." You can change your settings and then click the Preview button to see the effects.

You'll want to decrease the spacing settings when you have lots of text to fit on a slide. If you have plenty of room—or little text—you'll want to increase the spacing settings to make the text more readable. Be sure to keep the spacing fairly uniform on all the slides in a presentation.

Now let's change some spacing settings. We checked the settings for the bulleted autolayout text at the top of Figure A and found that its Line Spacing setting is 1 line and that its Before Paragraph setting is 0.2. Those settings work pretty well for that text object, so let's use the same ones for the bottom slide in Figure A.

To begin, select every paragraph of the manually bulleted text object either by dragging over all the text or by clicking the text box to surround it with eight selection handles. Next, pull down the Format menu and choose the Line Spacing command. As you can see in Figure E, Line Spacing is already set at 1 line, so tab to the Before Paragraph setting and type .2 or click the spinner box's up arrow until the box displays that setting.

Figure E: Change the Before Paragraph setting and preview the effect of the change before you return to the slide.

Click the Preview button to double-check the effect of the new settings. You might want to experiment further with other settings, but for now, click OK to close the dialog box and return to the slide—which now looks like the slide created with the bulleted autolayout.

Conclusion

Sometimes you may create a bulleted list from existing text without choosing a bulleted autolayout. On those occasions, you can use the techniques we showed you in this article to modify the formatting of your text to make your list more attractive.

The article entitled "Tips for Working with Bulleted Text Objects was originally published in Inside Microsoft PowerPoint, April 1997. Copyright © 1997, The Cobb Group, 9420 Bunson Parkway, Louisville, KY 40220. All rights reserved. For subscription information, call the Cobb Group at 1-800-223-8720.

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