E-mail this pagePowerPoint: Bulleted Lists
Bulleted List, Two Bulleted Lists
As with most of the PowerPoint slide layouts, these slides begin with a title field which should contain a description of the slide's contents. The title should appear in title case, with the first letter of each word capitalized.
Conveniently, if you forget to use title case, PowerPoint will remind you to do so: a small icon representing a light-bulb will appear in the upper left corner of the field.
When this light-bulb is clicked, you'll find that the "Office Assistant" will suddenly materialize with a handful of suggestions on capitalization. Your best option is the first ("Change the text to title case"), which will automatically do the job for you.
While Titles should adopt title case , Bulleted lists , on the other hand, should use sentence case : the first word following each bullet should be capitalized, but other words (unless proper nouns) should be left in lower case.
Periodically, you'll find that the small light-bulb icon re-appears to notify you of some other recommendations regarding your presentation. It's generally a good idea to click on the icon when it appears, though it's not invariably a good idea to follow it's recommendations... The Office Assistant may, for instance, recognize some words in your presentation that match entries in Office's Clip-Art catalog. When this happens, the light-bulb appears; when it is clicked, the Office Assistant will, less helpfully, offer up the clip-art categories in which matches have been found. Using clip-art is rarely a good idea
unless your ideas can be encapsulated by clichés.
To disable this particular class of reminder message from troubling you again, you need put a checkmark in the bottom-most field ("Don't search my documents for clips"), and then click the OK Button.
Tip for Bulleted Slides : Don't try to get too much information onto a single slide. Use the slides to summarize, illustrate, and focus points in the presentation, not to carry the entire text of the presentation,
Working with Bulleted Lists
Each bulleted list field you'll encounter in PowerPoint behaves in exactly the same way.
A bullet appears when you start to type in the bulleted list field, and every time you press the Enter key, a new bullet appears. (Pressing the Enter key twice leaves a blank line between bullets, but this isn't highly recommended because it produces awkward results if the presentation is later moved to the web.)
Pressing the Tab key demotes a bulleted item, making it a sub-point beneath the preceding item. Take, for example, the slide illustrated below:
By appropriately demoting sub-points, a more effective slide could be made. You could, for instance, position the cursor at the beginning of the second bulleted item and press the Tab key, and then repeat this process for the third line, to produce a more logically arranged slide:
Just as Tab is used to demote (diminish the significance) of a bulleted item, Shift+Tab can be used to promote (increase the significance) of a bulleted item. Any bulleted item that has been demoted can subsequently be promoted again by positioning the cursor at the beginning of the line and pressing Shift+Tab .