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