How to highlight text in PowerPoint

The human eye responds to color; we’ve known this for centuries. It’s no wonder that, as soon as color monitors became standard for home and office PCs, one of the first upgrades in word processing programs was a digital version of the old, reliable Hi-Liter pen. Highlighting portions of your text is a way of making sure the audience absorbs a particular concept. It’s especially useful in slides that are text-intensive or that feature tables, where individual words and numbers can get lost.

There are two ways to highlight text in PowerPoint: the usual way like in a word processing program, or by using a text animation. We’ll cover both methods below. Your presentations will be more effective once you know all you need to about how to highlight text in PowerPoint.

How to highlight text in PowerPoint

With your presentation open, select the text you want to highlight. If you are not already in the Home menu, click on it in the upper left.

In the Font section, you will see the control for highlighting text. It has a tiny icon of a highlighting pen (this might not be obvious). If you like the color the feature is set to, just click on the main button and you are done.

If you want to change the highlighting color, click on the arrow next to the main button. PowerPoint gives you 15 color choices for highlighting text. Click on the color you like and the text is instantly highlighted.

To change the color of the highlighting, just repeat the above procedure. If you want to remove the highlighting, click on the arrow again and select No Color.

How to highlight text in PowerPoint by using Text Effects

In addition to the standard, Microsoft Word-style highlighting of text, you can also emphasize text in a PowerPoint presentation by using one of the included animations on your text. To do this, select the text you want to emphasize and click on the Animations menu.

Click on Animation Pane and then on Add Animation.

At the bottom of the drop-down, click on More Emphasis Effects to bring up the complete list of emphasizing animations.

Not every effect will be appropriate for emphasizing text; some are too dramatic, some don’t stay until the end of the slide, and some (like Darken and Desaturate) are meant to de-emphasize text, so avoid those. Fill Color (shown below) and Font Color are probably the best choices for highlighting. Here is a list of the PowerPoint emphasis effects that can serve as a substitute for manually highlighting text:

• Fill Color
• Font Color
• Grow/Shrink (set it to grow)
• Brush Color
• Complementary Color and Complementary Color 2 (these will not work with black text)
• Contrasting Color (also not good for black text)
• Pulse
• Underline
• Color Pulse
• Grow With Color (this one might be incompatible with the other text on the slide)

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