The mystery of the option ‘Resize shape to fit text’

There are a few issues with the PowerPoint template of Howest that both users and I would like to see resolved. Now they cause confusion and lead to an inconsistent Howest look (and most likely we are not the only one with this issue).

Difficulties arise in two specific situations: when users switch the layout of a slide or use the feature ‘Reset’ in normal view. In both situations pink placeholders with the Slide Master settings ‘resize shape to fit text’ are involved.

The Slide master slides contain instructions for the user.

The first time you enter text in such pink bar (in normal view) the size of the bar corresponds to the length of the text. Settings go into effect as you would expect.

But when you use the feature Reset the pink bars take over the bar size of the Slide Master. Although the setting ‘resize shape to fit text’ is checked, the size of the bars do not longer correspond to the length of the text.

The feature Reset “resets the position, size, and formatting of the slide placeholders to their default settings”. This is taken very literally if you click on Reset.

The same happens when you change the layout of a slide with a pink banner via the feature Layout on the tab Home.

To get this right, you briefly need to check another option (for example ‘Shrink text on overflow’) before checking the option ‘resize shape to fit text’ again.

No wonder that this workaround confuses users…

Based on MS Office 2016

How to make coloured headings: PowerPoint versus Word

One of the most striking elements of the corporate identity of Howest University College West Flanders are the pink (magenta) text bars, as you can see in the folder below.

The layout of this folder is made by the communication department in the Adobe suite. But what about MS Office? In other words, how can lecturers of Howest implement this style element in a presentation or in their course material? I tried it out in PowerPoint and Word!

This post seems very much focussed on the branding of Howest, but similar headings are very popular in the world of graphic design. I collected a few examples on Pinterest.

In Word this style element can be introduced as a heading that you can add to the styles gallery if desired. Select the text of your heading and click on Shading on the tab Home. Choose the colour of the shading. (For your convenience you can install the corporate colours as theme colours, so you don’t have to set the RGB values of your corporate colours each and every time.)

Depending on whether you only select the text or the entire paragraph, this is the result:

HERE ONLY TEXT IS SELECTED

HERE THE ENTIRE PARAGRAPH IS SELECTED

In PowerPoint this style element can be used as the title of the presentation, to emphasize the central idea of each slide, to present a quote,… But unlike Word the feature Shading is not available for text in PowerPoint (if I am mistaken please correct me!) Also different from Word is that text in PowerPoint is always inserted in a text box or a placeholder (slide master)… So the way to achieve the same look is by colouring this boxes with the function Shape fill on the tab Home or the contextual tab ‘Drawing tools’. Resize shape to fit text ensures that the pink box corresponds to the length of the text (to do so: right click of the mouse on shape, format shape, size and properties, text box).

This is the result in PowerPoint:

If you take a look closer and compare the end result of the two methods, you can notice a tiny difference between the pink bars in Word and the ones in PowerPoint: the headings in Word look more cut off than the text boxes or placeholders in PowerPoint. This is because text boxes or placeholders have a left, right, top and bottom margin of which you can adjust the spacing. This does not seem possible via the feature Shading in Word.

    

Of course, it is also possible to introduce the pink bars as a text box with margins in Word, but since Word is a word processing program it is more logical to implement this style element as a heading style in the Styles gallery.

Based on MS Office 2013