Office 2007 Bible

PowerPoint

In some ways, Word and PowerPoint were meant to work together. That’s because PowerPoint uses heading levels that are similar to Word’s Heading styles. When creating a PowerPoint presentation, for example, it’s a simple matter to convert a Word outline into a PowerPoint presentation (or at least the basis for one), or to use a PowerPoint presentation as an outline for a Word document.

Converting Word to PowerPoint presentations

Converting a Word document outline into a PowerPoint presentation is simple—as long as you’ve used Word’s Heading styles for your outline, and as long as the outline contains no other text. Unfortunately, PowerPoint is not able to extract just the outline from a Word document, so you must manage that trick yourself if the document has already been written.

Tip

A quick way to obtain an outline from a Word document that was formatted using Heading levels is to insert a table of contents. Copy the table of contents to another document, press Ctrl+Shift+F9 to convert it to static text, save it, and then proceed.

To convert a Word outline into a PowerPoint presentation, in PowerPoint, start a new PowerPoint presentation (Ctrl+N). In the Home tab of the Ribbon in PowerPoint, click the New Slide drop-down arrow in the Slides group and choose Slides from Outline, as shown in Figure 42-8. In the Insert Outline dialog box, find the document containing your outline, select it, and click Insert.

Figure 42-8. You can use a Word outline to create a PowerPoint ...