PowerPoint is one of the most ubiquitous forms of communication from the classroom to the boardroom. Consultants use it daily to convey their points to clients, students use it to present to their classmates, and corporations use it to run meetings and make decisions. Given how frequently PowerPoint if used you would expect standard formatting for PowerPoint presentations, but you’d be wrong.
Style guidelines vary widely from company to company and even presentation to presentation. Depending on the audience and purpose for the presentation, the formatting, structure, and styles may vary widely. In this article, we will specifically focus on PowerPoint titles and headings.
Should PowerPoint slide titles be capitalized?
The short answer is: it depends. Many people argue about whether PowerPoint slide titles should be capitalized or not, but the answer usually depends on the organization you are creating a PowerPoint for. For example, when I worked at Capital One, we had day-long classes about how to create PowerPoint decks. We were told to create our slide titles in sentence case where you only capitalize the first letter of a sentence.
However, other companies have different style guides where you’re told to use title case on every slide. If you have no style guide to reference, we recommend using title case for the first (title) slide and sentence case for the titles of each subsequent slide.
Capitalization Styles
Sentence Case
Sentence case is a style of capitalization where only the first word of a sentence and proper nouns/acronyms are capitalized. Everything else is lowercase.
Title Case
Title case is a style of capitalization where you capitalize the first word in the title, capitalize the last word in the title, and capitalize the important words in the title. It is the most common form of title capitalization used in news articles, book titles, movies titles, song names, plays, and other works.
Capitalization of title slides
Title slides, the first slides in a PowerPoint deck, should always be capitalized using title case. This means that you capitalize almost all of the first letters of each word. You can use our tool to confirm which words should be capitalized.
You may also capitalize title slides in ALL CAPS, but this will depend on the theme you choose for your deck and whether it looks aesthetically pleasing.
Capitalization of slide titles
Slide titles after the first title slide should be capitalized in sentence case if you have no style guide to reference. Otherwise, follow the guidelines of your company or school’s style guide.
How to convert a PowerPoint slide title to sentence case?
PowerPoint makes it really easy to convert a title to sentence case. Just highlight the title, click the “Change Case” button (or press Alt+H+7+S) and your title automatically converts to sentence case. See the example of how to do this below.
How to convert a PowerPoint slide title to title case?
Converting a PowerPoint title to title case is not as straightforward as converting a title to sentence case. PowerPoint has no “title case” option for capitalization. They do have an option to “Capitalize Each Word,” but this does not conform to standard title case capitalization rules.
The best way to capitalize your titles to title case is to copy them into our tool, Capitalize My Title, and then paste them back into PowerPoint.
