How to Format the Text in Google Slides

Text is an essential part of a presentation, since it’s what you can use to introduce sections, explain concepts, show data and complement your visual content. For this reason, you should make it appealing and useful for your presentation. In this Slidesgo School tutorial, we’re going to teach you how to format your text in Google Slides step by step. You’ll also get to know the Paint format tool. 

Content

1. Formatting the Text
2. Using the Paint Format Tool

Formatting the Text

• Open your presentation in Google Slides.
• Select the text you want to modify.
• On the toolbar, you’ll find a lot of buttons and settings that you can use to customize and modify the text. Let’s see the most common ones.
• First, we have the font. To change the font of the text, click the Font drop-down arrow. You’ll see a list of available fonts.
• Click the one you want to apply. The text will change accordingly.
• Some of the fonts have an arrow pointing to the right. That means there are different styles to choose from. These are usually arranged from light to bold. To apply a style, just click the one you prefer.

• If you need more fonts, you can add more from Google Fonts. For more information, please refer to this tutorial.
• Next, we have the font size. It determines how big or small your text is. To change the size of your text, select it, click the Font size drop-down arrow and choose the size you want.

• You can also enter your own value. To do so, click the Font size text field (not the drop-down arrow), type the value and press Enter.

• Next, we have the bold, italic and underline buttons. The first style, bold, is used for emphasis. The second one, italic, makes your text lean slightly to the right. The third one, underline, draws a line under your text, in case you want to highlight something. To apply these, select the text and click the corresponding button.

• If you want to remove any of these three styles from the selected text, click again the corresponding button.

• Next, we have the text color and the highlight color. As their names suggest, the first one determines the color of the text and the second one determines the color of the highlight. It’s easy to change any of them: select the text, click Text color or Highlight color and choose the desired color from the list.

• Next, we have the align options. These are useful to align your text inside its text box. There are two types:

1. Horizontal align: If you click the Left, Center or Right buttons, you’ll align the text to the left, center or right, respectively. The last button, Justify, aligns the text so that each line has the exact same length.
2. Vertical align: If you click the Top, Middle or Bottom buttons, you’ll align the text to the top, the middle or the bottom of the text box itself.

• The last one we’re going to talk about is the line spacing. This option determines how much spacing there is between the lines of a text. To apply a specific spacing, select the text, click Line spacing and choose between Single, 1.15, 1.5 or Double.

• You can also enter a custom value for the spacing. To do so, select the text, click Line spacing and choose Custom spacing. Then, just type the desired value in the field below “Line spacing” and click Apply.

• Lastly, to remove any formatting from the text and leave it with the default settings, select the text and click Clear formatting.

Using the Paint Format Tool

• There’s an interesting tool in Google Slides called “Paint format”. This tool allows you to copy the format of a text and apply it to another text without having to change manually all the styles and settings one by one.
• First, select the text whose format you want to copy and then click Paint format.
• You’ll see that the cursor has changed and now it looks like a paintbrush. Select the text where you want to apply the copied format. The text will automatically change.

• You can apply the copied format to multiple texts. Select the text whose format you want to copy and double-click Paint format. After selecting any text where you want to apply the copied format, you’ll see that text has changed, but the cursor still looks like a paintbrush, which means you can keep selecting other texts to apply the format.

• When you’re done, click Paint format.