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What is an Outline ?

The Outline is a handy way to rearrange your presentation. You can easily change the order of individual points on a slide or you can rearrange the order of the slides.

Once you have created your presentation you need to create the slides by entering the text.

Text can be entered in either Outline view or Slide view.

The Outline view provides a useful overview of a presentation.

The Outline pane is an ideal place to edit your text especially if you want to move text around between different slides

You might want to make the Outline pane larger by dragging the line between the Outline pane and the Normal pane.

It will also be helpful to increase the zoom for the Outline pane. The default zoom for this pane is 33%.

You can enlarge or reduce the font displayed on the Outline tab by dragging the splitter bar.

This can be done either by using the drop-down box on the standard toolbar or by displaying the (View > Zoom) dialog box.

The Outline tab just displays the content of a presentation in Outline form.

In Outline view you can work on your text without the distraction of colour, graphics, charts, tables etc.

You can also easily determine the structure of the text on each slide by using up to five levels of indentation.

Outlining Toolbar

You will probably find it useful to have the Outlining toolbar displayed when you enter or change text in the Outline view.

This toolbar can be displayed by selecting (View > Toolbars) and pressing the Outlining command.

This toolbar will be docked down the left hand side of the PowerPoint window by default.

Inserting Slides

You can type slide text to insert a new slide

All new slides using this method will have the title and text slide layout

using the Outline shortcut menu

Deleting Slides

(Insert > Slides from Outline) browse to the Word file.

Importing an Outline

Select (File > Open) File of all types. Click on Outlines

Find the word document.

The imported outline will be open in Outline view.

Each major heading appears as an individual slide titles and each point appears as body text.

An outline of the text on your slides is accessible by selecting the Outline tab of the left pane when working in Normal view.

You can easily switch between the Slides tab and the Outline tab.

Ctrl + Enter - moves to the next title or body placeholder. If it is the last placeholder on the slide then it will insert a new slide with the same slide layout as the previous slide

Enter the title next to the first slide and press Enter

Click the Demote button to create the first bullet point

Type a series of bullets for the slide pressing Enter at the end of each line

You can adjust the various levels.

At the end of the last bullet, press (Ctrl + Enter) to create the next slide.

Used to only work with slide titles and main text

This lets you work on just the slide titles and the main text. This is very useful when you want to organise your presentation quickly by adding and amending the content.

very useful if you just want to edit text

Most presentations consist of text and bullet points.

The Outline tab that appears to the left of your Normal slides lets you focus on the text rather than the appearance.

The Outline tab shows your presentation as an outline, and the text on each slide appears as a separate heading at the highest level, and the text on each slide appears as lower-level headings subordinate to the slide headings.

You can expand the area devoted to the outline by clicking and dragging the border of the Outline pane.

The Outline is comprised of titles and body text of each slide. Any other objects that you add to your slide such as charts and pictures are not displayed in the Outline.

Also if you add any text objects to the slide in addition to the basic title and body text objects these are also not displayed.

Each slide is represented by a high-level heading in the outline. The text is drawn from the slide's title and an icon that represents the entire slide appears next to the heading. The slide number also appears to the left of the slide icon.

Each text line from a slide's body text appears as indented heading.

An outline can contain sub points that are subordinate to the main points in each slide. PowerPoint lets you create up to five heading levels on each slide.

There is a special dedicated toolbar for working with Outlines.

You can also add bulleted text in the Outline Pane just as easily

Only text in text placeholders with appear in the Outline. Text in tables, autoshapes or other drawing objects is not displayed.

You can easily create a presentation from an existing Word outline. In word, open the document File > Send to and click MS PowerPoint. Each heading 1 style becomes a slide title etc.

Things to Remember

You can only add text when you are working in Outline view. You cannot add any charts, tables, clip art or any other types of graphics.

A presentation Outline only contains the slide titles and main text items.