Changing Horizontal Alignment

You can set horizontal alignment on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis. The default alignment is Left, but you can also have Centered, Right, Justified, and Distributed:

• Left, Centered, and Right: These are fairly self-explanatory. They refer to the point at which each line of text aligns with the other lines of text. For example, the text in this book is left-aligned; the left edge of the paragraph is uniform and the right edge is ragged.

• Justified: Aligns with both the right and left margins of the text box. Space is added between words and letters to make that happen. The final line of the paragraph is not justified; it is left-aligned. Many newspapers use this alignment. It works best for long lines of text where there is a lot of text in which to spread out the extra spacing. Although justify looks good with large paragraphs, it is of limited usefulness for the brief bullet points that are the hallmark of most slides because it does not affect the last line, and in brief bullets the first line is the last line.

• Distributed: This is just like Justified except it includes the last line of the paragraph. You can use it to apply the Justified look to a single-line paragraph.

The Paragraph group on the Home tab (or the Edit Master tab) contains buttons for Left, Centered, Right, and Justified. Click a button to change the alignment of the selected paragraph(s), as shown in Figure 7.13.

Figure 7.13: Click a button on the Paragraph group to set alignment.

To use Distributed alignment, you must use the Paragraph dialog box. Click the dialog box launcher for the Paragraph group, and then choose the alignment from the Alignment drop-down list. Distributed appears on that list along with the other alignments.

EXPERT TIP 

Alignmentrefers to the text's position in its text box, not on the slide. If you want a text box centered on the slide, but the text is left-aligned within the box, simply move the text box where you want it. To align objects, rather than individual text paragraphs, see "Aligning and Distributing Objects" in Chapter 11.