How to Outline Text in PowerPoint?
Images and visuals are an important part of the presentation. These aids help to engage the audience, but text helps with the effective delivery of the idea. Optimizing text format can be an even better tool to make your slides look more attractive.
How to outline text in PowerPoint to engage the audience? Improving visibility of the text is the easiest yet most effective way to achieve this.
A simple heading with bold text is okay, but when you need to grab instant attention, outlining the text with a different color does a better job. Adding effects and colors to any heading or text is easy. The next sections cover the easy steps to outline text in PowerPoint and an automated tool to do everything with AI.
What is Text Outline in PowerPoint?
A text outline is the visible border or stroke around the letters in a text box. Changing the color of the characters is something, but adding a secondary color around the edges of the characters makes them stand out from the paragraph or content.
Why is an Outline Important?
When you can simply add headings to make your presentation more attractive, why try new and additional things?
Well, there are endless possibilities to make your slides more engaging and unique. Here are some reasons why you might want to learn how to outline text in a PowerPoint presentation:
- Improved readability by highlighting the most important stuff
- Enhanced the design appeal of the slides with text
- Makes important points easily accessible when addressing a larger crowd
- Add a professional touch to your PPT slides
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Steps to Outline Text in PowerPoint
In this tutorial, we will add a text outline to a heading in a new slide. Readers can apply the same method and steps to add an outline to any text in existing slides.
The process is simple, but you have to get creative with color choices according to the theme of your presentation. Follow these steps and don’t forget to stick till the end for an exclusive AI tool for PowerPoint.
Step 1
Open your existing PowerPoint presentation or start a new one with a blank slide. Select the text that you want to add an outline to.
Step 2
In the top ribbon, go to Shape Format Tab >> WordArt Styles >> Text Outline. The option to add an outline usually has character ‘A’ with a red underline.
Step 3
Click the Text Outline icon to open the dropdown menu will appear. Choose the text outline color that you want to add to the selected text.
Step 4: Make the Outline Thicker
If you want to make the outline color thicker than the default value, click the icon again and click the Weight option, and then choose the desired thickness of the outline.
You can also make the outline with dotted lines or set the custom colors. This simple process helps you to give a new look to the boring text of the slides.
How to Optimize Text with AI?
The above section only covered the styling part for the text in the slides. Adding colors and outlines to your heading is good, but sometimes you need more than just styling.
If the content does not add value to the topic, you need to rewrite it, optimize it, or make it better. Sometimes you might even add new formatting to the text. How about converting a longer paragraph into understandable bullet points?
Optimize Content with Twistly
Twistly is one of the most popular AI presentation makers in 2025. The best thing about Twistly AI is the seamless integration of the add-in. Users don’t even need to use any other software or online website.
Do you have a presentation with a text box that needs some polishing? Here is how to use Twistly AI to optimize text in your slides.
Step 1: Select Text in the Slide
Open your presentation, navigate to the slide with the text section, and select the text.
Step 2: Rewrite Text
Launch the Twistly add-in and click the Rewrite Text icon. Choose any specific option to rewrite or optimize text.
This option has several options available, including:
- Improve writing
- Translate
- Replace with bullet points
- Make it more professional
- Make it longer
- Make it shorter
- Fix spelling and grammar
- Simplify language
- Make it friendlier
- Custom instructions
All of these items in the menu can make your content more engaging, visually appealing, and more relevant to the topic of the presentation.
Step 3: Confirm and Optimize
Choose the action that you want to perform, select whether to apply the action to the entire slide or the selected text only, and continue.
Get Twistly For Free
Twistly not only optimizes the slides and text, but it is a complete AI presentation maker. You can create a complete presentation with this add-in within minutes.
This is the custom ChatGPT for PowerPoint that turns your topic or prompt into engaging slides, text, images, and formatting covered.
Try this advanced version of ChatGPT for PowerPoint for free with a trial version. Once you are satisfied with the feature, upgrade to the premium subscription for an affordable price. There is no stopping from making awesome presentations now.
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Conclusion
Select your text and use the text outline option in Shape Format. This is how to outline text in PowerPoint. But AI is the real game changer, where you use Twistly to create unlimited presentations with simple prompts and topics.