Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 : Formatting Text Boxes (part 1) - Applying Fills and Outlines, Setting Fill Transparency

Text boxes are just like any other object in their fill and outline formatting.

The fill is the center of the text box, and the outline is the border. Each can have separate formatting. For example, you can have a transparent fill with a solid border or vice versa. You can apply one of the Shape Styles presets from the Format tab to apply both at once, or you can adjust them separately with their respective menus on the Format tab. See Figure 1.

To apply one of the presets, click it, or open the gallery if the one you want doesn't appear. At the bottom of the gallery is Other Theme Fills, as shown in Figure 1. The fills on this submenu are the same as the background fills available from the Design tab. If you switch themes such that the background fill presets change, the background of the text box changes, too, if it is formatted with one of these.

Figure 1. Format a text box using the Shape Styles group on the Format tab.

Figure 2. Choose Other Theme Fills to select one of the theme's backgrounds for the fill of the text box.

For the fill, you can choose a solid color, a gradient, a picture, or a texture. For the outline, you can select a color, thickness, and dash style.

Selecting one of the background fills in Figure 7-15 fills the text box separately with one of the background presets. It does not necessarily pick the same background preset as is applied to the slide master. If you want the text box to always have the same fill as the current background, you can either leave it set to No Fill (the default fill), or you can set its fill to match the background:

There is only one minor difference between No Fill and a Slide Background Fill. If there are any objects stacked behind the text box, the text box obscures them when set to Background, but shows them when set to No Fill. Figure 3 shows the difference for two text boxes placed on a wood grain background with a filled oval overlaid.

2. Setting Fill Transparency

Fill transparency determines how much of the background (or whatever is layered behind the text box) shows through it. By default, it is set to 0, which means the text box is not transparent at all when it has a fill assigned to it. To set the fill transparency, follow these steps:

Figure 3. A slide background fill ignores any intervening objects.

Figure 4. Set a text box's transparency in the Format Shape dialog box.

There is another way to set transparency, but it only works when you are applying solid fixed colors as follows:

Figure 5. You can set fill transparency for solid-colored text boxes in the Color dialog box.