The look of your PowerPoint presentation can significantly impact how well your audience pays attention. One way to enhance the appeal of your slides or to emphasize certain information is by highlighting certain text.
Whether you’re going for a way to simplify the information on your slides or for an appealing visual effect, here are some of the best ways to highlight in PowerPoint.
Highlight Text in PowerPoint Using Word
Enter the text you want to highlight in Word or copy-paste it from the PowerPoint presentation. Select the text and under the Home tab, go to Text Highlight Color and select a color. The text will be highlighted in the color you chose.
The text will show up as highlighted in the Word document.
The mouse pointer will change into a paintbrush. Select the text you want to be highlighted and it will show up just like the text block formatted in Word.
Highlight Text in PowerPoint Using Shapes
Open the PowerPoint presentation and choose the text you want to highlight. Under the Insert tab, go to Shapes and choose the shape the highlighted color will have. We’ll choose a rectangle for this example.
Drag a rectangle over the word(s) you want to highlight.
With the rectangle selected, under the Home tab, go to Shape Outline and select No Outline.
Then, go to Shape Fill right next to it and select the color you want for your highlight. You have many more color options here than you do in Word.
Now the highlighted text will appear over the colored rectangle.
Highlight One Piece of Text in PowerPoint
The following steps apply to PowerPoint 2016 with an Office 365 subscription, PowerPoint on Mac and PowerPoint Online. The only thing that differs is the look of the Text Highlight Color icon.
Open the PowerPoint presentation, go to the slide you want to edit and select the text you want to highlight.
On the Home tab, go to Text Highlight Color and select a color. The text will be highlighted in the color you chose.
Highlight Multiple Pieces of Non-Continuous Text in PowerPoint
The following steps apply to PowerPoint 2016 with an Office 365 subscription and PowerPoint on Mac. The only thing that differs is the look of the Text Highlight Color icon.
Open the PowerPoint presentation you want to edit.
Without any text selected, on the Home tab, go to Text Highlight Color and choose the color you want to use for highlighting.
The mouse pointer will change to a highlighter as you move it over the text.
We’ve also got a guide how to choose the best fonts for PowerPoint, so you can make sure your presentations are setup for success.