Once your JICREG mapping map has been opened in PowerPoint, placenames are normal items of text like any other and as such can be edited, moved, restyled etc.

The simplest thing that you might want to do with an item of text on the map is to change what the text says or the font used in an individual item of text. PowerPoint does allow us to do some of these basic operations without us having to ungroup the map, but more complicated operations do require us to ungroup the map. Because it can be confusing sometimes when PowerPoint prevents us from doing things, and because it can be very difficult to select small text items by clicking on a map - we will always work on an ungrouped map when dealing with text. With placenames there are actually two levels of grouping, and this is done for a good reason, which we have already touched upon when discussing resizing maps. We will start with just one level of ungrouping. 

When you ungroup the map object and examine the result in the Select Multiple Objects dialog, you can see that the levels of placenames are still grouped together, in groups that are probably familiar to you from the placenames menu in the main mapping. Grouping placenames together like this allows you to change the style of all of them at once. Not all of these levels will have anything in them, so don't worry if you are looking at a map of Yorkshire and you have a group called Capital - it will simply be empty. With a group of placenames corresponding to a level selected it is possible to change the style of all of the placenames at that level.

We are going to start with a simple map showing a drivetime and a newspaper circulation area with sector labels and look at how we can improve the map with a bit of editing of placenames.

The first thing we notice with this map is that some of the placenames are extreemly difficult to read. As a result they make some areas of the map look cluttered and muddy. Looking more closely at a section of the map we can see that the problem occurs mainly where text items clash - especially in the striped fill areas. Placenames of large towns such as York are clear as they have a white box around them. We decide to try and do a similar thing for smaller towns.

The first step is to ungroup the map and select Small Towns using the Select Multiple Objects dialog

Now we can change the style of the text boxes that surround each item of text using the Format→Object dialog. You will see that the fill for small towns starts off as 'No Fill'. If we change this to white, then our text immediately becomes more clear. In the image below we have actually chosen yellow fills, so you can tell exactly what is happening.

The Format→Object dialog allows us to set the background colour and the outline of the textbox surrounding each item of text. If we want to change the font then we must instead choose the Format→Font dialog.

Here we can change the font, size and colour of the text. If you change the font size by a lot then you might find that the text box allocated for the placename is no longer the correct size for the text. This is particuarly a problem if you have made the text bigger, as it will now wrap in the textbox. We cannot solve this problem whilst the text items are still grouped together, as there is no common size that applies to all of the text items. 

When we change the size of text a lot then it may no longer fit in it's textbox.

To fit this problem we must ungroup the level of placenames, but retain the selection of all of them. So we select the level of placename we are interested in with the Select Multiple Objects dialog, before choosing Ungroup from the draw menu. Immediately after clicking Ungroup, all of the placenames that were in the level we ungrouped are still selected.

We then choose Format→Autoshape, and then pick the TextBox tab

Here we can uncheck the word wrap text in AutoShape option and check the Resize AutoShape to fit text option. Now when we choose a larger font, the text and textboxes behave much more as we would hope.

Sometimes you will want to move or delete a placename from the map. For example on the map that we have been using as an example, Darlington, near the top of the map, is not quite on the map, and really doesn't need to be there at all. We can either choose to delete the placename, or perhaps move it on to the map. In a similar way where text overlaps, we can move the two bits of text apart, or delete one of them, to make the map clearer. When deleting or moving a placename, it is important not to delete the whole group / level at once by mistake. So as with the resize text example above, we must do an extra level of ungrouping to get at the individual placename objects. However in addition - this time we need to select the individual text item in the select multiple objects dialog, after we have ungrouped.

So assuming we are starting from a fresh map (you may be able to skip some of the levels of ungrouping if you are not), we need to ungroup the map, and then ungroup the level of placenames that contains the placename that we are interested in. In this example Darlington is a Large Town, so using Select Multiple Objects, we select the large Town Group, and Ungroup it using the tool on the Drawing menu. Now that we can access each of the placenames individually, we can use the Select Multiple Objects Dialog to select just Darlington. The easiest thing is to click Unselect All, before clicking Darlington, to make sure we don't delete extra places by mistake.

Now to delete the placename, simply press the delete key on your keyboard.

Or to move it, you can nudge it around using the cursor keys of your keyboard. If you are careful with a mouse, you can drag the placename about, but you will have to drag the placename using it's border, as clicking in the centre allows you to edit the text, and clicking on the handles allows you to resize the textbox. For small movements, the cursor keys are sometimes easier.

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