How to Highlight Text in PowerPoint

How to Highlight Text in PowerPoint | Quick Tips & Tutorial for your presentations

Is your upcoming exhibition approaching? PowerPoint presentations are excellent allies to organize and visually display your content in front of an audience of any age. 

In the midst of the design process, you may have asked yourself, "How do I emphasize idea a or concept b more?" There are many possible answers to that question! 

Start your presentation from the foundations: download a Slidesgo PowerPoint template with a look that matches the theme of your project. With the right base design, structure your information and emphasize the most important points by learning how to highlight text in PowerPoint

With this simple tutorial, you will learn step by step how to use this technique correctly, regardless of the version of Microsoft PowerPoint you have installed on your computer.

How to highlight text with PowerPoint's "text highlight color" option

Do you have a clear idea of which sentences you want to make more eye-catching? Let's start working on it!  Follow these simple steps to color the text:

  • Open your PowerPoint presentation and go to the slide you want to edit. Then select the text you want to underline with your cursor.
  • In the top menu bar, select the "text highlight color" option and then choose the color that you like or that best matches the shades of your design.

How to highlight text in PowerPoint using a shape

If the previous editing method does not convince you, you can also use the following technique: 

  • Once you have your presentation open, go to the top menu and click Insert > Shapes > Rectangle. Immediately after the previous step, draw a rectangle covering the word or phrase you want to underline.
  • Keeping the rectangle selected, do the following actions: go to Home Menu > Shape Outline > No Outline from the drop-down menu.
  • It's time to customize the shape! Without deselecting the shape, click on the "Shape Fill" option to be able to choose a color.
  • After all these steps, keeping the rectangle selected, click with the right mouse button. In the drop-down that appears, find the option "Send to Back". And now you have the text highlighted to your liking!

 

How to highlight text in PowerPoint using Microsoft Word

If your Microsoft Office package is old (versions 2010, 2013, and 2016), you may have noticed that you don't have available the PowerPoint "highlight color" option explained in the first point. But don't worry! You can use Microsoft Word and PowerPoint in parallel to highlight:

  • In Microsoft Word, type or copy the text you want to underline. Check that the font size and typography match the PowerPoint text box in which you will paste the content later. After this first check, keep the text selected.
  • Go to the top "Home" menu, where the text customization options appear, and click on the "text highlight color" icon, which is located to the left of the text color change icon. Click and finally choose your preferred shade.
  • Select the text again and press Ctrl+C on your keyboard to copy the content.
  • When you paste the content over the presentation, a pop-up will appear that you must open and make sure that the "use destination theme" option is checked if you do not want to lose the shading, font type, and font size.

Alternative highlighting method in PowerPoint: how to highlight text using the glow text effect

In this tutorial, we bring you not one, not two, not three alternatives, but four ways to emphasize your PowerPoint presentation!

The following way to add unhighlighting to your content is different from the others from a visual point of view. How does it work? We explain it step by step below:

  • Are you on the slide you are going to work on? Perfect! Select the text you are going to use first.
  • Now let's apply the glow text effect. You will see a tab called "shape format" appear in the top menu. Click on it and perform the following steps: Shape Formatting > Text Effects > Glow.

As you can see, a submenu appears with different colors for the glow effect. Do you like one of them? Just click on it! However, if you want a color that is not available in that first sample, we recommend you go to the "more glow colors" option.

To show you the different methods of highlighting, we have used a template called Virtual Reality Workshop, but you can apply them in any of our customized PowerPoint templates. Let's get started!

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