PowerPoint really doesn't do it
Word and Publisher have text wrapping: you set a picture to "Square" and the words flow around it. PowerPoint never got that feature. A text box in PowerPoint is a rectangle, and its text fills the whole rectangle no matter what sits on top of it. There's no setting for it, in PowerPoint for Windows, Mac or the web.
That's fine for slides, but a lot of people now make newsletters, bulletins and flyers in PowerPoint, especially since Microsoft retired Publisher. A newsletter without text around its photos looks wrong.
Workaround 1: split the text box by hand
This is what designers do in PowerPoint, and it's what wrapping is underneath:
- Make the text box narrower so it ends above the picture, or beside it.
- Cut the text that doesn't fit and paste it into a second text box next to the picture.
- Put a third box under the picture for the rest, the full width of the column.
- Match the font, size and spacing in each box, and nudge the boxes until the lines meet up.
It looks right when you're done. The catch: change one sentence and the text no longer meets up, so you move words between boxes again.
Workaround 2: spaces and line breaks
For a small picture at the edge of a box, you can press Enter early on the lines beside it, or add a left indent to those paragraphs. It's quick for two or three lines and gets messy for more, and it breaks as soon as the text changes.
Workaround 3: do the wrapped part in Word
Lay out the text and picture in Word, which can wrap, then copy it and in PowerPoint use Paste Special > Microsoft Word Document Object. It shows up wrapped, but it's a Word object: you double-click it to edit in a Word window, and fonts and sizes can shift.
Workaround 4: let a tool split the boxes for you
I built a tool that does workaround 1 automatically. You upload a .pptx and it finds text boxes with a picture covering some of their words. For each one it measures the text with the real fonts and splits it into a box above the picture, a box beside it and a box below. Every box is still normal PowerPoint text, with your font, size, colour, bold and bullets. You see a before-and-after preview of every changed slide before you pay.
- It handles a picture on the left or right of a column, several pictures, and two-column text boxes.
- If the wrapped text no longer fits, it's shrunk a little, but never below 70% of its size; otherwise that box is left as it was.
- It only touches text a picture actually covers. Text with animations, and text set in the middle or at the bottom of its box, is left alone.
Be aware: it's a one-time layout. PowerPoint still can't wrap, so if you edit the text later the boxes don't reflow. Put the file through again after big edits, or fix small ones by hand.
Coming from Publisher?
If your newsletter started as a .pub file, my Publisher converter turns it into a .pptx and does this wrapping for you: text that went around pictures in Publisher still does in PowerPoint.