The screenshots and steps in this answer are based on PowerPoint installed to a Windows PC, Office 365 subscription -- available for free to LSC students via portal.office.com.
If you started your citations with bullet points, you first need to remove those for the hanging indents to work using these instructions.
Like Word, PowerPoint has a cluster of paragraph settings, and we can click on line spacing to open up the Line Spacing Options (which includes indentation settings).
However, we have to do something a little different than Word -- we can't just select 'hanging indent' and be done with it!
- Select "Hanging" from the middle section for Indentation, and set it at 0.5".
- Add 0.5" spacing "before text" in the middle Indentation section as well.
And voila, hanging indents on your slide!
Wait, it didn't work right.
Sometimes, (not sure why) it won't work correctly -- the whole thing will be indented together instead of creating the hang. This workaround seems to help:
- Create a new slide.
- Paste your citations onto it.
- Clear any spacing/indentation formatting they brought with them. At the very least, backspace over any gaps until they're all back to the left edge.
- Re-select, and then try the steps above to set the hanging indent.
Note: there's not a special citation format just for presentations, and often visual style is more important than citation format in this case. Double-check with your professor's expectations, but you might not need the hanging indent or the double-spacing...though it's a safe bet everything needs to be alphabetized.
You might have to manually fiddle with your citations list (if it's long) to situate it across multiple slides.
You do want those citations to be readable from across a room, just like any other text -- and don't just completely fly by them at the end of your presentation. Of course you won't read them to your audience, but pause a little bit to give them a chance to take a look.
You might have to manually fiddle with your citations list (if it's long) to situate it across multiple slides.
You do want those citations to be readable from across a room, just like any other text -- and don't just completely fly by them at the end of your presentation. Of course you won't read them to your audience, but pause a little bit to give them a chance to take a look.