A text box is the most used shape on your PowerPoint slides and it can comes in various flavors and colors. A text box can simply contain one word, multiple words or maybe multiple lines of text. But how do you handle variable text that might range from 10 characters to 80? With dynamic PowerPoint font size scaling.
This only applies to dynamic values coming in via DataPoint while running the slide show. In design mode, you have plenty of options to control the font size:
- Do not autofit
- Shrink text on overflow
- Resize shape to fit text
This does not work when you change the content of a text box (DataPoint) while the slide show is running.
To fit all text in a text box, you probably have to find a perfect match between the text box size and font size. When using our DataPoint add-on, you can bind text boxes to a database column and that column can contain whatever text. And whatever text implies a variable number of characters for the possible content. So it will be a hard job to choose a given font size for your variable content. Sometimes the name or text that you need to display is short in length and can use a large font size.
And in other times, you have a text of multiple lines etc at the exact same text box requiring a much smaller font size.
But, as you will experience over time, the text to be displayed are probably very fluctuating. You will see that often. The chosen font size is either too small or either too large.
But, as creative as we are, we have implemented a feature to cover this: Dynamic PowerPoint Font Size Scaling based on the length of the text.
With our DataPoint tool, you can dynamically display information from any data source. Once a connection is set up, you can then link a given row and column combination to a text box. Earlier, you would have to set the font and font size as you normally do within PowerPoint, but now you can set the font size scaling dynamically based on the length of the text.
How to use this? Easy. Select the text box that is already displaying your dynamic text. Then click the DataPoint menu and click the Text box button to open its properties. Then click to select the Texts tab.
First of all, check the option Use dynamic font size calculation to enable this new feature. Then there are 2 ranges that you have to set:
- Range for the number of characters of your text box content
- Range for the minimum and maximum font size
First range is the range of the ‘normal’ minimum and maximum number of characters that are normal for this type of text data and your data. When the text length is shorter than the minimum number of characters, then DataPoint considers it as the minimum set here, to avoid extreme values. Same for the maximum. Texts with lengths larger that the maximum value set here, are treated as if they had this maximum value.
The second range demarcates the range of the font size. A text with the minimum number of characters, will be getting a font size that is set as the maximum font size. The text with the maximum number of characters, will be seen with the minimum font size. All other text lengths in between the minimum and maximum number of characters, will be getting a font size dynamically calculated based on its length.
With the numbers from the screenshot, a given sentence with 45 characters will get a font size of 53 pixels. Why? 45 characters is exactly 50% or the middle of the number of characters range. 80 – 10 = 70, 70 / 2 = 35. The lower range of 10 + 35 characters, matches the 45 characters of our sentence. So when you calculate the middle or 50% of the font size range, then you calculate 96 – 10 = 86. 86 / 2 = 43. Lowest font size of 10 + 43 is 53.
With this new DataPoint and its dynamic PowerPoint font size scaling, your text boxes will always be filled with the same proportions, whatever the text length might be.
