Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

Step 2: Writing the Outline

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it’s the rare presentation that doesn’t include at least some text. Deciding how to transform possibly boring facts into compelling word slides is often the most challenging part of creating a presentation, so words are a good place to begin before you get too hung up on design. If you’ve already worked up an outline in Word, skip ahead to Using a Word Outline to import it into PowerPoint.

Otherwise, open PowerPoint’s Outline view by clicking the Outline button at top of its pane. When you do so, the pane gets wider to accommodate your text, and the thumbnails are reduced to mere specks.

Each numbered slide icon at the left of the Outline pane represents an individual slide. Whatever you type adjacent to the slide icon becomes that slide’s title, whether or not there’s a title placeholder in the slide’s layout (see Figure 16-4). Indented lines below the title correspond to the slide’s subtitle and bullet text. (Bullet text refers to lines of text denoted by special bullets markers—see Formatting).

To generate more outline text, you can do any of the following:

• Add a slide. Press Return after typing a title to start another title—and another slide. Each title corresponds to a slide.

• Demote text. Press Tab to demote a title into a bullet point under the previous title or bullet point. (Demote is outlining jargon for “make less important,” or “move down one level in the outline.”) If you continue pressing Tab, you ...