Learn how to change the bullet size and the color attributes in PowerPoint 2016.
Tip: Do you want the bullet color and size changed in all slides? The instructions on this page are for working with individual slides in Normal view. To apply these changes to all slides, follow the same steps within the Slide Master view.
Open the presentation, navigate to the slide where you want to make these changes, and select the bulleted text. If you want to make these changes to all the bullets in the text placeholder, you can select the entire placeholder by clicking on the edge of the placeholder (see Figure 1).
Access the Home tab of the Ribbon and click the down-arrow beside the Bullets button (highlighted in blue within Figure 2). This brings up the Bullets drop-down gallery, as shown in Figure 2. Within this drop-down gallery, choose the Bullets and Numbering option (highlighted in red within Figure 2).
This will open the Bullets and Numbering dialog box, as shown in Figure 3. Make sure that the Bulleted tab of this dialog box is selected. Within the Bulleted tab, you can see the Size and the Color options, as shown highlighted in red and blue respectively within Figure 3.
To change the size of the bullet in relation to the text, just type in the value in the size box, or use the up and down arrows placed next to the size box to increase/decrease the size value. As you can see in Figure 4, the dialog box now shows that the size value has been changed to 75 percent of text (highlighted in red).
Click the Color button to reveal the Color gallery, as shown in Figure 5.
Automatic: This is the default color for the bullets -- uses the same color as the text color.
Theme Colors: Choose any color from the active Theme of the presentation. you can also choose from any of the 5 tints (lighter variations) or shades (darker variations) for any Theme color. Do remember that these colors will change if you apply a new Theme to your presentation.
Standard Colors: Choose from any of the ten standard colors. These ten standard colors are just choices of colors that PowerPoint believes to be widely used. These colors will not change if you apply a new Theme.
The Standard tab provides 127 colors in a honeycomb style palette, 14 gray shades, black, and white.
The Custom tab enables you to chose any color from the spectrum and later adjust the selected color's luminosity with the slider on the right. You can even enter specific values of RGB and HSL to create a specific color -- all these combinations provide 16 million color choices!
Select any color you want. As soon as the color is selected, you can see that the bullet color changes in the Bullet Style previews (highlighted in red within Figure 6).
Now, click the OK button to apply the choices you have made to your selected bulleted text.
Figure 7 shows the changed bullet size and color within the selected text placeholder (compare Figures 1 and 7).