PowerPoint Textbox

Adding A Textbox In PowerPoint

When adding text to their PowerPoint presentations, many people limit themeselves to using only the placeholder boxes that are present by default when you add a new slide. For example, when you add a title and content slide, there is always a title placeholder in which you will see the words "Click to add title" and a content placeholder that displays the words "Click to add text". It's then a simple case of clicking into each of those boxes and then typing your content.

However, another way of adding text that gives you more flexibility over positioning is to add a textbox. Click Insert > Text > Text Box, and the cursor will change to this shape:

Left click with the mouse and drag out the textbox. Once the text box has been drawn, you can start typing in it. When you drag out your initial text box, it retains it's width, but the height contracts temporarily to be the height of one line of text. When you typr multiple lines, the height will adjust to fit, but the width of the textbox will remain fixed.

This is what the textbox looks like:

You can see resizing handles at each corner and also halfway along each edge. You can resize the textbox by clicking and dragging on any of those handles.

Moving A Textbox In PowerPoint

Moving a textbox around in PowerPoint is as easy as drag and drop. If you are not careful, though, you will end up draging the resizing handles. The first thing you have to do is select the textbox as a whole. To do this position the cursor over one edge of the textbox until you see a double headed cursor.

When you see the cursor change shape, click on the box. When the textbox is selected, the dashed bounding lines become solid lines, as shown below.

Now you can mov ethe textbox around either by clicking and dragging with the mouse, or by pressing the arrow keys on your keyboard.

Now that you've learnt how to add textboxes to your PowerPoint presentations, why not spice them up by inserting images.