Working with bullet points on PowerPoint slides can be frustrating. When you're working on a PowerPoint slide that uses the bullet list format, PowerPoint, by default, inserts a bullet point to start the next line when you press the Enter (or Return) key. This isn't always what you want, but you can easily avoid this by manually inserting a soft return.

Let's say you want to separate the text in the first bullet in the example below and move the text after "little lamb" to a new line without inserting a bullet. You'd start with this:

If you press Enter (or Return) after "little lamb." you get a new line and a new bullet:

If you don't want to create a new bullet, use a soft return. A soft return automatically moves the text to the next line without adding a bullet. To force a soft return, hold down the Shift key while pressing the Enter (or Return) key. The insertion point will move to the next line without a new bullet and align with the text above it.