Making Bulleted Text Align in Word and PowerPoint
Formatting in Word and PowerPoint can be really frustrating. The number one cause of baldness in admins is Word. One of the most frenzy-inducing features is the bulleted list. You want it to look like these examples from a recent post about eggcorns and malaprops:
But instead it looks like this:
In the first example, the ruler looks like this:
The top arrow is aligned with the bullet and the bottom arrow is aligned with the inset text. As long as you set your arrows up this way, the subsequent lines will add up.
In the second example – what you don’t want – the arrows look like this:
The part that confuses most people is that different margins apply to different parts of the document…so highlight your bulleted area, then change the arrows on the ruler. When you get to the end of your bulleted list, hit enter and backspace through the empty new bullet. You’ll return to the default margins for the sheet. That’s the easy one.
PowerPoint is a whole different ball of ire.
The thing to understand about the older versions of PowerPoint is that each element – text box – has its own margins. You can put paragraph text and a bulleted list in the same text box, BUT, if it results in the icky alignment seen in example 2, you have a problem. Moving the arrows around the way I showed you will fix your list, but result in a paragraph that looks like this:
Your bullets will look good, but nothing else will. The solution is to make a new text box for the bulleted list, then just use the guides to align the text boxes. Annoying, but not difficult. Newer versions treat alignment the same way Word does, so at least that’s over! Whew!
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