Adjusting letter and line spacing is a great resource when building good slides. Increasing them helps to improve readability when you present your content on a projector.
Another great field where the increased letter and line spacing is very helpful is to help people that have reading problems or dyslexia. If you are presenting in front of a large audience, this can be very helpful for those who struggle with reading the text. You should also increase the font size if you want to make sure that everyone sees everything clearly.
But what can be done in Google Slides?
Adjusting line spacing inside a text box
The first thing we can do to improve our presentation is to adjust the line spacing within a text box.
Line spacing is the amount of space between two consecutive lines. Increasing it will make the text look more spaced out, give more “air” to the text and prevent the “wall of text” effect you can see in slides with too much text. It also helps readability got those who struggle to read.
To change line spacing in Google Slides you need to:
- Select the text.
- Open the “Format” menu.
- Choose “Line & paragraph spacing”.
- Select a preset value between 1.15, 1.5, and double, or insert a custom number with the Custom Spacing option.
In my example, I used 1.5, and you can see on the next screenshot the difference it made on the text.
Adjusting the spacing between paragraphs inside a text box
By default, each paragraph in a text box in Google Slides is directly attached below the preceding. If you want to give a separation between them, you can add extra space so each paragraph has some air around.
To change the space between paragraphs in Google Slides you need to:
Select the text.
- Open the “Format” menu.
- Select “line & paragraph spacing”.
- Here you can either select the “Add space Before Paragraph”, “Add space after paragraph”, or use the “Custom Spacing” option to manually select a narrow or wide spacing.
In my example, I used “Add space after paragraph” to increase the paragraph spacing.
If you use one of the predefined options, the menu will automatically change to “Remove space before paragraph” to enable you to revert the change.
Letter spacing: how do I change it?
Unfortunately, the response is: you can’t change it.
A response in the Google support center states it clear: There’s actually no way to do it. You can read the whole thread here. It refers to Google Docs, but it’s the same for Google Slides.
So what can you do if you’re dealing with people with reading problems?
You can for sure add some space between lines, make the fonts bigger, or use (among the ones included in Google Slides) the most legible fonts like Open Sans. The “More Fonts” option in the fonts dropdown can give you access to some additional fonts you can explore for something easy to read.
Unfortunately, until Google implements this function in its suite, there’s no way of solving this issue.
Conclusions
The Google suite is a very powerful tool, but sometimes you need something particular and it’s not there. If you particularly care about having the letter-spacing implemented, you can leave feedback to Google, and hope that you’re not alone. You can find the instructions on the Google help thread I mentioned before, you can find it here.