Inserting an outline into PowerPoint

- Your outline may start as a Word document, but need not stay there. It's quite easy to transfer an outline from Word into PowerPoint. You can use tools in Word to create your outline, then use that text to quickly create a PowerPoint slideshow. This outline covers setting up a home garden. I've been working on it in Word and I'm pleased with it. It's not done, of course. Outlines are always fluid. But I'm ready to continue working on this material as a slideshow. The translation works like this. Level one topics become slides, with the topic text appearing as the slide's title text set in its own text box on the slide. Level two subtopics appear as a bulleted list in a second text box. They're numbered one through whatever. Any further levels are formatted as bullet points, and they can make the slide look junky, so try to keep only level one and level two topics. You'll see how these level three topics translate in a moment. If the outline is good, save it. Open PowerPoint. If prompted, start a new presentation. Click the Insert tab. In the Slides group, click the New Slide button, Slides from Outline. Browse to locate the Word outline document. If you do as I do, then you'll note the outline documents by the word outline or TOC in the file name. Click to select the file and open it. The outline is inserted into the presentation, though the initial blank slide remains. You can delete that. Here are the level one topics as slide titles, with the level two topics appearing as bullets. Each item is in its own text book. Here on the second slide, you see the level three topics are converted into bullets. They still fit on the slide, but if you have too many subtopics, PowerPoint shrinks the text so that it all fits. Back in the Word document, if you need a blank slide for something you want to add later, just set a blank level one topic, basically an empty paragraph. If you have pictures in your outline, which I don't recommend, but it's possible, they do not transfer into the presentation. Besides, it's better to work with pictures in PowerPoint and add and position images, as opposed to attempting to do such a thing in a Word outline. At this point, continue to use PowerPoint to refine the presentation. You've already set the order and major topics, so apply all your fancy slideshow skills to keep your audience engaged and awake.