MVP Renewal
It’s another celebration here at TLC Creative Services as Troy adds his 2025-2026 renewal disc to his now overflowing Microsoft MVP award – that makes this his 21st year being awarded as an MVP for PowerPoint from Microsoft!
Deprecation of PowerPoint’s Reuse Slides Button
Microsoft announced earlier this month (July 2025) that the Reuse Slides button will be removed from the PowerPoint ribbon. Why? We’re assuming usage analytics showed this feature was collecting dust, but it’s also possible that Microsoft could be implementing a new reuse system – we just don’t know!
If you aren’t familiar with the Reuse Slides button, you’re not alone. Here’s where to find it (until tomorrow):
It opens a menu within PowerPoint that allows you to pull slides from any deck on your computer, SharePoint, or OneDrive to use in the presentation you’re working on.
You may ask, “is this different from just copying and pasting with ‘Keep Source Formatting?'”
Technically, yes, but the result is the same. Slides from another deck are added to the current deck. The key difference is that Reuse Slides doesn’t require another deck to be open as it’s all done within its own interface in PowerPoint. And if “Reuse Slides” is part of your workflow, be prepared that you’ll now need to go find the other presentation, open the presentation, select the slides, copy the slides, paste the slides into the current presentation.
We feel most people have two or more decks open and simply copy-paste slides as needed as opposed to using the “Reuse Slides” button. However, after today, July 31, 2025, when the “Reuse Slides” button disappears from PowerPoint, everyone will be using the copy/paste method!
-The TLC Creative Design Team
When All is Bold, Nothing is Bold
Are you designing a PowerPoint presentation with a LOT of text? Want to make your points stand out in a sea of words but you’re not sure how? Here’s our answer: the skillful use of typography is one of the most important aspects of any slide layout! And how well it’s done will determine how well you can communicate your message.
Here’s An Idea: Go Big and BOLD!
One of the many powerful tools in a graphic designer’s typography toolkit is bold type. It’s heavier and darker than regular type and is designed to grab attention. It not only calls out significance but also helps the viewer quickly identify what is important.
We originally posted a similar article in August of 2020 and the same design principles apply today. Bold type can be used like a spotlight in the design with the goal of creating a clear visual hierarchy. Make something bold when it needs to stand out, like a headline, a call-to-action, or an important detail in a block of text or in a table.
But here’s the thing: bold fonts are used for emphasis, too much bolding can have the exact opposite effect!
When Everything is BOLD – Nothing is Bold
Overdoing the use of bold text makes the design feel loud, cluttered, and less legible. This is important because the presentation audience generally spends only a few seconds viewing a slide to capture the important details. The designer’s goal is to make sure the main points stand out and can be quickly identified.
The key is to use bold type sparingly, like a highlighter for your most important points. It should support your layout, not overwhelm it. So, don’t overdo it. A little goes a long way.
In the example below, everything is bold. Which points are the most important? The reader can’t tell, and the message is lost.
This next example uses bold type sparingly and only in the headline and subheads. At a quick glance, your audience can easily pick out ideas on what to do this summer, and your message is successful (backyard BBQ anyone?).
When used in the right place, selective bold text reinforces the message. Just ask yourself, “What do I want the viewer to notice first?”, then let bold type do the rest.
Happy bolding! This post is from our Look Back series, rediscovering previous blog posts with relevant PowerPoint Tips, Tricks, and Examples for today.
-The TLC Creative Design Team
Do This – Not That: Paragraph Space vs. Extra Line
What constitutes a good choice vs. a bad choice, when it comes to formatting slides? So many things! But for this blog post, let’s look at adding space between bulleted lines of text on a slide.
Let’s use the following two slides as an example. Both of these sample slides, Slide 1 and Slide 2, have 5 bullet points. Both have spacing between the bullets. But only one is built as a “good” slide (in our humble opinion)!
Slide 1 – The Wrong Way: Extra Lines Between Bullets
Our Slide 1 example has the most common formatting solution, which is also the “bad” formatting solution. An extra line has been added between each bullet. While this adds extra space visually, it introduces blank paragraphs and creates other formatting issues when the slide needs to be edited.
Problems with this method (aka – why this is a bad choice):
- Inconsistent spacing if the font size or line height changes
- Screen readers or accessibility tools may misinterpret the content
- Extra lines count as content, which affects slide layouts and animations
- It is more difficult to manage or edit later
Slide 2 – The Right Way: Paragraph Spacing
In our example on Slide 2, the professional formatting option is used to create added space between each bullet; paragraph spacing has been applied. Specifically:
- Paragraph spacing before each line of text is set to 18 pt (this can be increased or decreased for more or less space separating the bullets, designers’ choice!)
- No manual line breaks are used
Why this is the better method (aka – the “good” choice):
- Cleaner formatting behind the scenes
- Consistent spacing, regardless of font or text size
- Easier to edit, you’re not dealing with phantom blank lines
- Better for accessibility
- Simply, more professional formatting
TLC Creative’s Best Practice
When you need to visually group or separate bullet points:
- Use Paragraph Spacing “Before” or “After” in the Paragraph settings (we prefer setting “Before” spacing and leaving “After” at 0)
- Avoid manual spacing with extra lines (e.g. don’t hit that Enter key and quietly remove the bullet with a backspace, and please don’t do a Shift+Return for “soft returns”)—these shortcutscan cause long-term formatting frustrations
- Bonus Tip: You can set paragraph spacing directly in your slide master for automatic, consistent formatting across slides
Conclusion
Adding space between bullets makes content more legible—but how you add that space matters. Using manual line breaks creates cluttered code under the surface. Using proper paragraph spacing gives you clean, consistent, and professional slides every time.
Let your formatting work with you, not against you.
-The TLC Creative Design Team
A Look Back to Text Box Internal Margins
Need a little more breathing room around your text in PowerPoint? Or no room at all, with text starting at the edge of the shape? Adjusting the margins inside a text box can make a big difference in how clean your slide looks. Not to mention that consistent margins can make it way easier to align text boxes – as well as shapes, images and videos.
When adding a new text box, PowerPoint uses whatever internal margins were set as the default for the template. The dilemma is this internal margin can be a bit annoying when trying to align elements nicely and neatly with other elements on the slide.
PowerPoint’s text box and shape internal margin, or padding, is the distance text starts from the edge of the text box or shape. Think of every text box as a mini-Word document, with margins on the top-bottom-left and righthand side. Here is an example from the Microsoft PowerPoint 2025 default template. You’ll see it is set at .1″ for the left and right margins and .05″ for the top and bottom margins. Added text is slightly inset from the bounding box of the text box according to these settings.
What is great is that text box and shape margins (and table cell padding) are easily customized in PowerPoint.
- Select a text box
- Right-click and select Format Shape in the menu
- In the Format Shape pane go to the Text Options tab
- Click the text box icon
The internal margins can easily be adjusted by updating the value in the Left/Right/Top/Bottom margins fields. Type in exact values or use the up/down arrows to adjust these values in preset increments. Internal margins can be as small as .01″ if you are manually typing in the value. Also, if you are manually adding the margin values, the TAB key moves the cursor to the next margin box, with its value selected and ready to be updated.
At TLC Creative Services, our design team generally uses the template setting or removes the text margins entirely, so the text box has 0″ margins.
Here is the same text box as our previous example, but now with 0″ margins all the way around so the text starts at the top and the left edge.
If the slide title placeholder and content placeholder are both set with the left edge at 0″ (or both set with the same margins), aligning the text boxes also aligns the text, and then these elements can be easily aligned with other content on the slide.
Here is another example of where you might adjust text margins, this time in a callout bar. Here the text is left aligned but is inset significantly from the left edge. This is accomplished by setting the left internal margin to 1″ in from the left edge vs. the default .1″ setting.
That’s it! Like most typography work, the small margin tweaks may seem minor, but they play a big role in helping slides look neat and aligned with better text legibility. Hoping this gives you some solid formatting ideas for your next PowerPoint presentation formatting.
-Mike and the TLC Creative Design Team
How We Setup Reference and Source Text Boxes
PowerPoint presentations often need references, disclaimers, or legal notices on slides—but not always. Many of the presentations we work on have a variety of text box formatting and location needs for these important (but often small) amounts of text. Internally, our design team uses a special set of rules for formatting these text boxes. This makes the formatting task quicker and easier, and keeps the slide content clear. Let’s dive in!
What is a Reference Text Box?
On many slides – especially when showing data, citing sources, branding details, or adding footnotes – a small reference text box is needed at the bottom of the slide.
TIP: because this is generally not a text placeholder on the Master Slide Layout, we paste a reference version onto an extra (hidden) slide so we have all of these formatting options set to go! Here are the two “template” or reference text boxes, ready to be pasted into our slide deck.
TLC Creative Formatting Guidelines for Reference Text Boxes
When setting up a reference text box, these formatting details help maintain readability without distracting from the main content:
1. Font Size: Small – 8 to 9 pt (adjust as needed for the font being used)
2. Alignment: Left-aligned
3. Text Box Margins: None (set all text box margins to 0)
4. Vertical Position: Bottom aligned – because this is a bottom-of-the-slide element, additional lines of text should move upward, keeping the bottom line of text always in the same position
5. Paragraph Spacing: 4 pt before – provides a small gap between multiple lines of text when longer citations or source text is needed
6. Width: Set the text box to full slide width, and shorten as needed, to fit the layout design
For teams managing brand consistency or legal compliance, reference notes can make a big difference in creating polished, professional presentations.
Need help optimizing your templates or standardizing presentations – like assuring all reference text is consistent across all slides?
The TLC Creative team can help bring consistency, clarity, and design precision to every slide.
–The TLC Creative Design Team
Do This, Not This: Put PowerPoint Text In The Shape
One of the biggest things that irks us at TLC Creative is stacking text boxes on top of shapes in PowerPoint. It might seem like a quick fix, but it’s just lazy formatting. Don’t do this – please! It almost always can be avoided because it almost always leads to formatting headaches down the road.
What is “stacked text”? It’s placing a text box on top of a PowerPoint shape. This creates two objects on the slide that need to be moved and aligned together instead of just one object.
This often happens because someone is not familiar with how to control a shape’s text. Knowing how to edit text inside a shape is ultimately going to make future slide edits happier, vs becoming a slow and time-sucking process.
Another reason not to stack is that text boxes placed on top of a shape are often not horizontally aligned with the shape. As an example, a text box stacked on top of a shape with the text left aligned is not truly centered by default – the text box must be manually moved to center the text on the shape – ugh! Even if you center the text in the text box, you still have to select both objects and center them to one another. The better solution is to set your text inside the shape and simply center the text – yay!
When it comes to animation, it might seem easier with two objects, but it’s still two objects. Don’t do this! You can get the same effect with one object. PowerPoint actually allows you to animate text within a shape independently. This means you can get the same effects without the hassle of animating multiple objects.
Selecting objects can also be difficult when using two elements. When the overlapping textbox is bigger than the shape behind, it’s a little tricky trying to select that back object. You will need to select both, then Shift deselect the top text box in order to modify the back underlying shape (you can also use the selection pane).
Accessibility is another good reason not to stack a text box on top of a shape. The Office PowerPoint accessibility tools do not work very well with layered content, as these tools have several limitations in identifying stacked objects. As an example, white text on top of a light baby blue shape isn’t seen by the accessibility checker as a flawed low contrast item. PowerPoint looks at a text box with no fill color and sees it essentially in black-and-white and ignores the layered element underneath. This can lead to content being missed by users relying on screen readers.
In conclusion, managing text within a shape is simply way more efficient. You have a single object to select and work with while designing, your animation and selection panes are less cluttered, line wrapping adjusts automatically when the shape or text size changes, and the list goes on. All of this makes it easier to keep a clean and responsive layout, plus it’s also more accessible.
-Tips and a big ask, from the TLC Creative Design Team