Hello once again. In this lesson, we're going to discuss text as a visual aid. Text is unfortunately what most slides default to for content. If you intend your audience to read your slides rather than listen to you, then by all means text is going to be absolutely necessary. But when we want the audience to hear our words, and carefully listen to them, too much text on a slide can be distracting. The human mind cannot both listen and read at the same time.
Yes, except for you, Chloe, you're special. adding text to the slides is easy. The standard way to add text is to select a layout that already has a text box included. Let's add a title slide for our presentation and insert the title. Now you can move the text boxes and format the text using all your different formatting tools as one might expect. There's a difference rule of thumb suggesting that the minimum font size on the slide should be 30 points.
Generally speaking, this is my target, though sometimes it's not possible or desirable. For instance, on this title slide, I wanted the title to be as large as possible, but fit on one line. It just so happens that this turns out to be 36 point font. However, when it came to my name, I wanted the second row to be slightly smaller and slightly shorter. So this just happened to work out to be a 24 point font. Sometimes I want my text to be really small so as to not distract from my visual aid, but to include only because it's necessary.
For example, when I've referenced my sources, or I have to include page numbers on my slides, adding more text boxes to a slide is simple. In fact, let's move on to the second slide and set up our three key PowerPoint global statistics. I didn't want to start With a templated layout, so I just started with a blank slide as I often do, and I added a textbox to the slide. You can also add shapes and input text. Let's say I had a quote to include, I could insert a call out and insert my quote. This is a slightly fancier way of including a quote without using a conventional approach that everyone else uses.
If you want to fancy up your text a little, you can go to the Insert menu, or the Format tab and select the word or tile. This gives us a bunch of stencil fonts to choose from. However, try to keep your fonts consistent throughout the entirety of your presentation and avoid any fonts that are hard to read or distracting. In this case, I've chosen to use the Arial Black so when I add text boxes or use Word Art, I need to update by font to match. I don't want to leave you with the impression that all text is bad enough fact quite the opposite. Having a few key words or points listed on the screen, as you speak to them can also help you convey your message, but choose which words you put on the slide selectively.
I find that when you are listing items, text can be helpful. Often, you'll want to have some sort of a header on the slide. Think of this header as a headline that you'd find on any news article, make it a tease to the audience to want to learn more about the content of the slide and avoid using a generic title. Let's just say the name of the study was a study of PowerPoint annoyances that isn't all that exciting. So instead, let's try to stimulate a little more curiosity in our audience by saying instead, five things about PowerPoint that drive us crazy. This encourages the audience to play along with the speaker and see if they can guess themselves what the findings were from the survey.
So There you have a few key ideas and how you incorporate text into your PowerPoint. The three key messages in this lesson are, first of all, decide whether you want your audience reading text or listening to you remember that they can't do both. Secondly, if you use text, make it readable, bigger is better. And finally, use text to stimulate curiosity and reinforce your key points. That's all for this lesson.