It’s easy to create text with bites in PowerPoint, although it is a little time consuming. That’s not a big issue since
you’ll want to use this effect sparingly as a design style for some titles or text boxes only. To make sure that you know what text
with bites means, look at the before and after slides in Figures 1 and 2 – this effect is also
known as “eaten-up text”.
Figure 1: Before the bites
Figure 2: After the bites
Although the figures and the steps use PowerPoint 2007, the actual effect can be easily replicated as far back as
PowerPoint 97.
Follow these steps to get started:
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Create a new slide, and apply the Blank slide layout.
To do this, create a new presentation based on a theme or template, and then make sure that the Home tab of the
Ribbon is active. Click the Layout option to bring up the Layout gallery, and
choose the Blank layout (see Figure 3).
Alternatively, skip steps 1 and 2, and
download the source presentation here.
Figure 3: Change slide layout
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Select the Insert tab of the Ribbon, click the Text Box option and click on the
slide to create a text box.
Type in a somewhat large word, we typed CHALLENGE, and changed the font to Arial, 88 pt. (see Figure 4).
Figure 4: Add a text box, and format the font
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Select the Insert tab of the Ribbon and click the Shapes button to access the
Shapes gallery. Then select the Rectangle option (see Figure 5), and draw a
small rectangle anywhere on the slide.
Figure 5: Select the Rectangle shape
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With the rectangle selected, click the Drawing Tools Format tab of the Ribbon, click the
Shape Outline option to access a fly-out menu, and then select the No Outline option (see Figure 6).
Figure 6: No outline for the rectangle
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Place this rectangle as one of the bites over the text. This “bite-rectangle” is a totally different color as of now and may
not look like a bite – don’t worry about that now, we’ll take care of that later.
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With the rectangle still selected, press Ctrl + D to duplicate the bite. Resize as required, and
place as a bite over the text. Create and place several such bites.
We also placed large bites covering the entire top and bottom areas of the text (see Figure 7).
Figure 7: Place the bites all over
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Now select all the bites (make sure you don’t select anything else), right click and choose the Format Object
option to bring up the Format Shape dialog box. Select the Fill tab, and change the fill to
Slide background fill, as shown in Figure 8
Figure 8: Change to Slide background fill
- You
can see the results in Figure 9.
Figure 9: Transparent bites
Note: Although we used rectangular bites for this tutorial, there's no reason why you cannot use another shape like a
sphere or triangle to create the bites. You can also use different shapes to "bite" the same word.
Tip: Also, do remember that you can copy the word and the bite shapes to another slide or another presentation, you can
also replace the word since it essentially is editable text. However you might have to move around the "bites" a little since the
shape of each word is different.
Tip: Remember that you can “bump” the rectangles around with your keyboard arrow keys,
depending on your snap to grid settings.