Are you bursting with information that you need to share with your audience?
Arming yourself with a professional slide deck is a great place to start. There are clever ways to present all your information to the audience. Here’s where columns come in.
Make it easier for your audience to read and follow along your presentation. Breaking text into columns is a great design trick. It specially works for large blocks of text.
Organize information in a logical and clear way. This will make it easier for you to present and for the audience to digest. This slide format can also break the monotony of block text slides. Make your presentation fun and visually engaging!
Today, we’ll look at why columns are important for presentations. Plus, I’ll show you a couple of ways to add them to your slides.
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Why Use PowerPoint PPT Columns?
Without columns in your PPT presentation, it’s easy for information to get cluttered. Instead of neat, organized columns, your slides can become too text heavy.
When slides look heavy and hard to read, you can potentially lose your audience. They’ll be missing out on the information you worked hard to gather.
Columns in PowerPoint can be key to getting your information across. They help your slides stay organized by grouping relevant information together.
PowerPoint columns improve slides readability, making it easier for an audience to follow along.
Now, I’ll show you how that looks in practice. Let’s work through this quick PowerPoint tutorial.
Bleu – A Business Presentation Template
Follow along as I show you how to add columns in PowerPoint. Just download the ga-analytics#sendElementsClickEvent”>Bleu Business Presentation from Envato Elements.
This professional template has minimal slides. This can help you give an engaging presentation. Add team information, app and site mockups, charts, and more with the premade slides.
All of it can be customized to fit your business, right down to the fonts and theme colors.
Bleu is included in all Envato Elements subscriptions, but more on that later. Right now, let’s learn how to add columns in your PPT presentations.
How to Make Columns in PowerPoint
There are a couple of ways to create columns in PowerPoint. Both ways are worth learning.
Time to dive in and see how you can use PowerPoint to create columns in slideshows.
How to Add Columns in a PowerPoint Text Box
Before adding my PPT columns, I’m going to prepare the slide. We can duplicate Slide 11 from the Bleu template.
Go ahead and delete everything but a single text box from the duplicated slide. We’ll use the remaining text box for this part of the tutorial.
Right click the text box that’s left on the slide, and click Format Shape.
With the Text Options tab selected, you’ll want to click the rightmost option, Text Box. Then select the button labeled Columns… to add and edit PPT columns.
Clicking the button will open a small window with a pair of options: Number of columns and Spacing between columns.
For this tutorial I’ll set these values to 3 columns and 2″ spacing before clicking OK.
We now have our columns! I’ll move my text box to so it’s centered in the slide.
Here’s how our original text box looks now that it has columns:
Editing text in these columns can be a bit awkward at first, so take some time and play around with it. Add and remove line brakes with your Enter and Backspace or Delete keys.
Resizing your text box can also help even out your columns.
Here’s what my columns for a demographic slide look like after a few tweaks:
The spacing here seems a bit off. Let’s see if I can tighten things up. Play around with the column spacing and adding a blank column PPT:
That’s much better! With some adjustments I can make the ideal columns for my PPT presentation slide. And all it took was one text box.
There is another way to create columns in PowerPoint PPTs, though.
Let’s see how we can use tables to get these results.
How to Make Columns in PowerPoint Tables
Let’s prepare another slide before we begin. You can duplicate the slide we just edited and remove the text box table.
Select the Insert tab from the ribbon, then click Table.
Here you’ll see a grid that lets you choose the number of columns and rows you’d like to add. Hover and click the desired cells. I’ll add a 3×8 table to my slide.
I’m also going to add the information from my text box columns.
So what do we do if there’s more information we need to add? I’d like to add a location column to my PPT table.
First, select the table cell that’s to the left or the right of where you want to add a new column PPT. You’ll now see a Layout tab appears at the end of the ribbon.
Here is where you’ll see the option to choose Insert Left or Insert Right to add a new column.
You can place your new column where you’d like. I’ll add mine on the end.
Here’s how my table looks now with a new column and information added:
Our Finished PowerPoint Columns
As you can see, both ways of adding columns to your PPT slides work. The method that works for you will depend on why you need columns in the first place.
You should also consider how much control over customization you’ll want to have. Try working with both. See how you can make each PowerPoint PPT column style work for you.
Learn More About PowerPoint From Envato Tuts+
Figuring out how to add columns in PowerPoint is fairly simple in the end. We have even more quick tutorials to help you improve your presentations. Start learning ga-analytics#sendElementsClickEvent”>how to make a presentation about yourself in PowerPoint.
The instructors of Envato Tuts+ have hundreds of guides worth checking out:
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Start Adding Columns in PowerPoint Today!
Learning how to add columns in PowerPoint is a great way to create successful presentations.
After all, slideshows are a visual aid, so keep the emphasis on visuals. PPT columns work great instead of text. They will help you present more compelling slide decks.
Start adding columns in PowerPoint to impress your audience!
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I’m an instructor for Envato Tuts+ that will go wherever words will take me. I create written content for the Business and Design & Illustration topics for the Tuts+ website, but you might spot me on YouTube as well.
Researching and learning about new industries has always been an interest of mine. That’s why my career has seen me write for nonprofits, consumer packaged goods brands of Fortune 500 companies, and everything in between.
I’ve enjoyed putting ideas into words, whether it be for creating video scripts and social media posts, or while UX writing and collaborating on presentations. When I’m not behind a keyboard, you’ll more often than not find me on a football pitch, snapping photos, or spending quality time with food (and my favorite people of course).