Just a while back I was creating a list of PowerPoint keyboard shortcuts and didn’t like what I saw. The list was huge and once I was done, I looked at my list and thought no one’s going to be able to make sense of it. This is what it looked like.
Place your content box on top of your layout
Notice that the text goes way out of the slide at the top as well as at the bottom. Another alternative I could have gone for is to change the dimensions of the slide. For that you click on Design in the main menu, then Slide Size and select Custom Slide Size.
Yeah, like that…
But I wasn’t happy with that either. I wanted another option altogether. And I scratched my head and ranted! When I found the solution, I admit that I was embarrassed that I never knew about this tiny little life changer right there! So follow the simple instructions below and you’ll be good.
Before that, look before you leap. 🙂
let’s adjust your text box first.
Follow the red dotted lines…
…and your all set for the next step. 🙂
Now, select your text box again and follow the red dotted lines.
We will first set the number of columns and the spacing.
Your content should look something like this now.
You can take it from here. Follow the previous red dotted lines and you can set your contents to any number of columns and adjust the spacing yourself.
Good Luck!
Once you’ve learnt how to do this, you will be able to break down lengthy and single-column data into multiple columns. Where once I had such a column, I now have a clean and eye-pleasing data table.
Example of 3 column content layout
Example of 4 column content layout
Example of 4 column content layout in landscape mode.
Watch out for more step-by-step PowerPoint tricks!
