PowerPoint Creation Tips: Font

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When creating a PowerPoint presentation, one of the first things you will want to do while setting up your Master Slide will be to select a font. Choosing a clear, crisp font is best as they tend to be easiest to read. A few fonts that fall into that category are Arial, Arial Rounded MT Bold, Century Gothic, Comic Sans MS, Tahoma, Verdana, and Microsoft Sans Serif. There are, of course, numerous other fonts available in PowerPoint that are both clear and crisp. If you have selected a font, but have found that it appears to be too faint, do not be afraid to bold it. Not only can bolding help make your text really pop within a PowerPoint, but it is also an excellent way to accent or highlight the more important parts of your text as you build the presentation. Shadowing, underlining, and italicizing are also all excellent tools to help showcase portions of your text.

Two very important things to keep in mind while building out your presentation are font size and spacing. In terms of font size, slide titles tend to look best anywhere from size 38 to size 44, while slide text tends to look best in a hierarchy of 32, 28, 24, 20 - or - 28, 24, 20, 18. Please note, however, that depending on the font you have chosen, these numbers may vary. Any font that is below size 18 or 20 tends to become hard to read for the end user. In terms of font spacing, anything between .85 and 1 between lines generally is easiest to read. Once you dip below .85 in the line spacing, the text begins to look squished together.
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To adjust the line spacing of your text in PowerPoint 2003:
- Highlight the text or select the text box
- Click on the “Format” drop down menu & select "Line Spacing" from the list

- The "Line Spacing" box will open

- Adjust the spacing and click "OK"
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To adjust the line spacing of your text in PowerPoint 2007:
- Click on the Line Spacing icon from the “Home” menu & select “Line Spacing Options…” from the drop down menu

- Adjust the options in the “Line Spacing” section of the “Paragraph" box that opens

- Adjust the spacing and click "OK"
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When adding in text to your slides, it is also very important not to overcrowd the slide with text. If you have a lot of information that pertains to one topic, it may be best to break it down into several slides as opposed to trying to fit it all on one slide. See below for an example of an overcrowded slide:

See below for an example of how much easier the information is to read once broken out over two slides:

Utilizing the above tips will keep the information in your PowerPoint presentations uncluttered and able to be easily read by your end users.