Curved Text in PowerPoint: This Is How You Do It

Are you looking to make your PowerPoint presentation a little more dynamic and your text more visually appealing?  Curved text may be just the thing for you. Learn how to curve text and enhance it with various effects and settings.  

You’ll also learn the best effects for this type of formatting and when to use animation to showcase your curved text.

 

Prepare text in PowerPoint: This is what you need to do

First and foremost, you need a current version of Microsoft PowerPoint. If you are a subscriber to the Office 365 version, you will always have up-to-date access to the program and can get started immediately.

Either open an existing presentation or create a new one. After you’ve created an empty slide by going to New Slide under the Home menu, go to Insert and click Text Box. The text you enter into your newly created text box should be aligned in the center.

To do this, select your written text, go back to Paragraph under Home and select Center. You can also use the Ctrl+E shortcut.

 

 

Curve text in PowerPoint

Select your text and go to Insert > WordArt. Select the style you want from the menu. Now go to Shape Format/Drawing Tools Format and select Text Effects >Transform. Here you will see a whole range options to change the shape of your text.

The options under Follow Path are Arch, Arch: Down, Circle and Button. Choose one that works best for your presentation. Turn your text field, if possible, into a square. If the text is long enough, you can shape it into an arch. If the text isn’t long enough, you can simply increase the font size.

In your text field you’ll see a yellow dot. By clicking on it with the right mouse button and holding the mouse button down, you can specify how far the curve should stretch.

 

Additional options and effects for curved text in PowerPoint

The Text Effects menu offers many other options you can apply to your text. You’ll find over 20 predefined formats there, such as Shadow, Reflection and Glow. You can also experiment with other WordArt formats, which can be found in the same Shape Format tab. Text Fill and Text Outline allows you to change color.

Unfortunately, there is still no feature that allows you to wrap the text around corners. You can get around this by creating a separate text field for each side of the hypothetical square.

There are several ways of using animations to showcase your curved text. Go to Animations and select one of the predefined motion effects.

Animations that work best with curved text are Fade, which lets you fade your text in and out from the center of the imaginary circle, and Zoom, which scales the circular text.

 

Also highly recommended is the Grow & Turn effect, which inflates the text field like a ball and lets it bounce into the slide. Another fun one is Wheel. With the help of these effects, you can choose various transitions to display the text symmetrically from all sides like a clock.

Object Color should be avoided, as it doesn’t work well with the text field. On the other hand, the Underline and Brush Color effects are great for creating impressive presentations.

 

Follow-up formatting of curved text

You can find even more ways to customize your text by right-clicking it and selecting Format Shape. This will open a menu on the right side of your slide. The middle icon, Effects, can be used to add shadows or reflections to make the text look more vivid.

3D effects can also be made under 3-D Format to give the presentation more visual depth. As the saying goes, less is more, so avoid using all options at once – your text will look overloaded and detract attention from the actual content.

Reflection works especially well with curved text. You can choose from some predefined settings and manually adjust the details of the effect. The same applies for Shadow. You can choose and customize the angle and transparency of the effect to best suit your needs.

 

Curved text in PowerPoint is a good technique for wrapping text around images or icons to add even more visual interest to your slides. With a little practice and a good eye, curved text in PowerPoint is a great way to enhance and improve the visual impact of your presentation.