One of the most common ways of highlighting key points in your PowerPoint presentation is by formatting text to make it stand out. In this lesson, you will explore how to format characters, format paragraphs, and format text boxes. You will also become familiar with how to access some useful tools like the Format Painter, Eyedropper, and Dictate Function. A newly opened coffee business called Quik Brew wants Grace at WestCal publishers to create a nice PowerPoint presentation for a local trade fair. Quik Brew also wants WestCal to redesign the company flyer. Take a look at the previous version of the flyer. If you are struggling to process the text and visuals on this flyer you are not alone. On the front, there is a barely legible tagline, an obscured logo, and a rectangular-shaped photograph of what appears to be baked goods. The back of the flyer is not much better. The font is jarring, mismatched, and the text is not well-formatted. This is a nice photograph, but it would be easy to assume that the business was advertising pastries instead of coffee. Over the course of the next couple of lessons, you'll explore the various options and elements available in PowerPoint that allowed WestCal to take this flyer and turn it into this. Let's begin with formatting text, which is one of the most common ways of making key points in your presentation stand out. Most of your character formatting options can be found on the Font group of the Home tab in your PowerPoint file. On the top row, you will find menus to change the font face and size. You can also nudge the font size up or down. The final command in the top row will clear all formatting from text. On the second row, the commands allow you to apply effects to text, such as bold type, italics, and underline, shadow, and strikethrough. Next, you will find drop-down menus to adjust character spacing: text case, text highlight, and font color. Finally, the Option button in this group opens the font dialog box. You will also find some of these formatting commands on the mini toolbar. This font type doesn't really suit the Quik Brew header. Let's change to something that is easier on the eye. Select the text, and now you can change the font type using either the toolbar that comes up to the right of your text, the drop-down on the ribbon, or the font dialog box. Something like the Calibri font would look more elegant here. When you are finished settling your options, click "Okay" to apply your changes or click "Cancel" to discard them. Let's create a next line of text underneath the word Quik Brew. This time let's add a new word art graphic. Click "Insert" then "WordArt" and a new text box will appear. Simply replace the placeholder text with your text. Notice that you can resize, move, and rotate WordArt like other objects. You can also customize it using normal formatting commands. To format existing text as WordArt begin by selecting the tag text, then click the "Shape Format" tab and choose a style from the WordArt styles gallery. You can try out different Shape Fills, WordArt styles, Text Fills, Text Outlines, and Text Effects. The Option button into WordArt styles group will open the format shapes task pane. The text options section of this task pane provides advanced formatting options for WordArt. There is a second slide here that lists some of Quik Brew's services. Again, the font does not look very good. Let's change the font type to align with that of the header text. The Format Painter allows you to copy formatting from one object and apply it to another object. To start select the text or object with the formatting that you want to copy. In this case, selecting any letter or word would work fine for applying the formatting to another piece of text. Though you can also select the entire set of words if you wish. Next, select the Format Painter icon on the Home tab or on the mini toolbar. Now select the object that you want to apply the formatting to. When you release your cursor, the formatting will be applied. Now that you're familiar with applying WordArt in PowerPoint, let's progress to converting text to SmartArt. SmartArt is Microsoft's intelligent way of creating diagrams. To convert existing text to SmartArt, select it and select the Home tab, then Convert to SmartArt. There are so many layouts here to choose from, including vertical and horizontal bulleted lists, curved, table, and picture lists. Once you have selected a graphic the text will be converted. Grace in WestCal thought that a continuous picture list or a vertical picture list might be suitable as you can input some nice graphics in line with the text. Here's a sneak preview of her proposed slides for the list. But you'll discover much more about using SmartArt to achieve these effects in PowerPoint in an upcoming lesson. The final character formatting option that we are going to explore is the ability to globally replace fonts. To begin, click "Home", Replace, and then Replace Fonts. The replace font dialog box will open. Here we can choose the font that we want to replace and what we want to replace it with. Click "Replace" and PowerPoint will complete the replacement. Would you like to learn how to take a break from typing.? Well, PowerPoint's dictate feature does the work. Next time you'll discover how to do this and much more about the many formatting options available in PowerPoint.