Graphical content such as photos and charts can work well either in placeholders or as manually inserted objects. However, when it comes to text, you should stick with placeholders as often as possible.

Placeholder text appears in the Outline pane, whereas text in a manually inserted text box does not. When the bulk of a presentation’s text is in manually created text boxes, the outline becomes less useful because it doesn’t contain the presentation text.

In addition, when you change to a different formatting theme that includes different positioning for placeholders—for example, to accommodate a graphic on one side—the manual text boxes do not shift. As a result, they might end up overlapping the new background graphic with unattractive results. In a case such as this, you would need to manually go through each slide and adjust the positioning of each text box.

However, there are times when a manually created text box is preferable or even necessary. For example, suppose that you have a schematic diagram of a machine and you need to label some of the parts. Manually placed text boxes are perfect for these little snippets of text that are scattered over the surface of the picture.

Manual text boxes are also useful for warnings, tips, and any other information that is tangential to the main discussion. Finally, if you want to vary the placement of the text on each slide (consciously circumventing
the consistency provided by layouts), and you want to precisely position each box, then manual text boxes work well because they do not shift their position when you apply different themes or templates to the presentation.

If you insert text in a placeholder and then change the slide’s layout so that the slide no longer contains that placeholder (for example, if you switch to Title Only or Blank layout), the text remains on the slide, but it becomes an orphan. If you delete the text box, then it simply disappears; a placeholder
does not reappear. However, it does not become a manual text box, because its content still appears in the Outline pane, while a manual text box’s content does not.

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