Working with Bullets in PowerPoint 2016

During this Microsoft PowerPoint 2016 training tutorial video, you will learn how to use bullet points and numbered lists as well as how to customize them to suit your style and preference.

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Hey. Welcome back. We’re in module four and we’re talking about text and bullet editing options in this particular module. Now we’re down on section two now and we’re actually going to talk about how to change those bullets. If you need them to be a different color or a different size, things like that. Also numbers because numbers kind of go right along with bullets. So let’s go ahead and move into our presentation and we’ll go ahead and see how that works.

Okay so we’re back in My Presentation. And when we left off in the first section we were talking about the title slide. So let’s go over to slide two and there’s our bullets. Now if you remember we had some first level bullets on slide two and on slide three we had some first and second level bullets. So a real quick recap and we’ll go back to slide two.

Remember with your bullets that if you want to have one of the different levels and I told you there are five different levels you can have. You’re going to hit the Enter key first, you’re going to hit the Tab key to get the next level down. And remember that if I keep hitting Tab I’ll go down to the five levels. Shift-Tab goes back up. So remember Tab demotes and Shift-Tab promotes.

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Now we’ve got these bullets here and you probably noticed that these just came along automatically with the particular template that we were clicked on. Now if we wanted to change those we could. We could also change the spacing between the bullet and the text or we can change the spacing as far as for the bullet lines up at this line itself. So let me just show you that real quick.

Now I’m clicked inside the first level here and if you look up on your ruler, see these indents? Now if you’re familiar with those in Word they’re very similar. The way they’re going to work in PowerPoint is the top one controls the bullet and the bottom one that points up controls the text next to the bullet.

So if I need more space between my bullet and my text, I want to move the text over to the right a little bit, I’m going to grab the one that points up, drag it over and wherever I let it go that’s where the text will line up. If I move it back the other way then I can put it back the way it was. And also remember I just said if you wanted to change where the bullets located.

So if I take the top one here I can move it over to the right a little bit and that moves the bullet or vice versa. So that’s a quick way just to change the spacing between the bullets if you need to do that. Now let’s talk a little bit about changing the actual bullets themselves.

Okay. So if you notice where I’m pointing this is your Bullets button. And I clicked the little down arrow to the right of it so you could see some of the different styles of bullets that you can pick from. Now you get some generic ones here. And you’ll notice as I move my mouse over these you can see it actually changing the first bullet.

Now I can also tell it I don’t want bullets at all by choosing None. But what if I didn’t like any of these? Then I could go to the Bullets and Numbering. Now before I click on that the reason I’m only changing one level here or one bullet is because I’m clicked in that one level only. So I’m going to go back out and choose the placeholder first and then I’m going to click the down arrow. Now you’ll see that when I move over one of the bullets that I’m actually changing all of the ones that are on this particular slide.

Now I’m going to go down to Bullets and Numbering. Now here’s the same ones we saw a few minutes ago and let me show you some of the additional options before we actually go and change the picture here. You can change the size of the bullet in relation to the text. So 100, size 100 would be the exact size as the first character of text. So I can always move this up or down to whatever number that I like. I can also change the color of the bullet here. So if I wanted red bullets I could change it.

Okay as far as changing the bullet itself I can get a picture or customize. Now let me start with customize just for a moment.

Now if you’ve used previous versions of PowerPoint this whole little bullet section is very different because it used to be that when you clicked on Customize you were in the same window but you had a whole bunch of different fonts you could pick from in this list. Notice now you get Normal text or Latin text and that’s pretty much it.

Now no matter which one of the fonts that you choose here you can also choose a subset. And they’ve got several that you can pick from here as well. Whatever font or subset you choose make sure you scroll down to see all the different types of bulleted items that you could have. So for example, if I went down to Miscellaneous Symbols then you’ll see I can have the sun or a smiley face, any of those could be my bullet.

So let’s just say I pick the smiley face right here and I click OK and let’s say I click all the way out of it. Now notice I have these red smiley faces right here.

So let me go ahead and go back in there again. We’re going back to Bullets and Numbering. Now the other thing I can do is I can choose a picture. Now when you choose picture you can choose to pick a picture that is a file in your computer already or you can do a Bing Image Search. Let me browse and show you the first one.

And I’m just going to randomly pick some picture from my computer. Let’s say I go down this list here and I pick, let’s say I pick this one that says Clear Skin. I know that’s going to be weird looking but. You can see back here that now that picture I had saved is actually my bullet. So you can always do that.

Now the other thing is, let me go back into the bullets here. I might decide from this picture option to pick, to do a Bing search. So let’s say that I want these pictures to be dogs or I could even look up the word Bullets. It doesn’t really matter. You can look up anything you want. I’ll look up bullets.

How about that? And I’m just going to go and Enter and it’s doing a Bing search for bullets. And any of these that come up I can use. So let’s say I like one, for example. I’m going to click on it and I’m going to choose Insert. And now you’ll see that that’s my new bullet. So I can pretty much make the bullets look any way I like.

Now what if you didn’t want bullets you wanted numbers instead? All you’d have to do is come up here to the Numbering button. There’s several different numbering styles you can pick from. If you like one you just click on it. But let’s go down to Bullets and Number and again if I’m clicked on a particular number style here I can make the number 100% or whatever percent I want of my text.

It’ll be the same size. And then again I can pick my colors here. So I’m going to click OK and now you can see it’s numbered. And like you just saw if you didn’t want 1, 2, 3 then you might choose to have A, B, C’s or Roman Numerals. That’s kind of up to you. But you can have any numbering style that you like.

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Now let me show you this. When you’re over on bullets that have more than one level and you choose numbers, for example, you’re going to see that your second number looks like an outline. And so you’ve got different styles you can pick from for that as well. And when I go to Bullets and Numbering I can go down and pick whatever bullet or number I want it to look like. And notice that if I wanted bullets I’d just go back to the bullets over here. I don’t have to actually get all the way out of it. Okay?

So that’s kind of how your bullets and your numbers are going to work. So you can just look through and pick any kind of bullets or numbers you want. Now keep in mind something I told you in section one at the very end. Again, when we look at the masters in a later module and we want to change the bullets for every slide in our presentation it’s not going to override these two we were just playing with because I manually changed those. So just kind of keep that in mind. Okay?

Alright so that’s going to wrap up module four, Text and Bullet Editing Options. I’ve got a little exercise I want you to do over in this third section here. So if you go ahead and open that video I’m going to give you some instructions on what we’re going to do just to make sure you’re okay with how to change text and bullets.

Simon Calder

Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA. He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!