It has happened to almost everyone who has set up a Scientific Poster in PowerPoint. You get everything set up in a column, and it’s just a little bit too long.  You need those words, and you wish you could squeeze everything  just a bit.  Here are a few tricks that might help.

A very easy thing to change is the line spacing of your paragraph. By default, PowerPoint sets your text with 100% space between lines, and you can easily compress that space to 90%, sometimes more depending on the font.  This picture show Times New Roman with 100 and 90% line spacing, and as you can see both look OK.

PowerPoint Line Spacing

 In PowerPoint 97-2003, do format>line spacing.  In PowerPoint 2007, go the home tab, paragraph, hit the little expander ikon on the lower right, and the line spacing is at the bottom on the right.

One other favorite trick of mine is to find a one or two letter word by itself on a line. Make your column just a tad bit wider until the word jumps to the line above, giving you one more line.

We think text needs to be 24 point to be nice and legible on your poster. Reduce your type to 24 point if it is set up to be larger, as many of our poster templates use 28 point type. Failing all else, you can try setting your type size to be 23.5 and who will know? It might give you just the little space you need.