Just discovered this rather handy feature in Microsoft PowerPoint. Ever wanted to quickly turn some outlined notes into a set of slides? This is the feature you need!
Especially useful for academics or anyone who outlines first, then needs to quickly generate a set of tidy-looking slides at the end. I think this is a godsend, because it avoids the pitfall of PowerPoint, where you get bogged down in styling or transitions, where you should be spending time on structuring your narrative well and breaking it down into manageable chunks. With the ‘import from outline’ tool, you can work away on your narrative in a format-neutral environment, then import and style it with the click of a button. Not only that, but you can use your ready-made outline as a handout – much more user-friendly than a slide notes view.
From the MS PowerPoint help file:
Create a PowerPoint presentation from a Word outline
You can use a Word document to create a PowerPoint presentation. To set up the slides in a presentation, PowerPoint uses the heading styles in your Word document. For example, each paragraph that is formatted with the Heading 1 style becomes the title of a new slide, and each Heading 2 becomes the first level of text. To make this easy, you can create a document in outline view, which already has headings associated with the text.
Note You can only import an outline that is saved as a Rich Text Format (.rtf) file.
Step 1: Create an outline in Word
You must apply a heading format to the text that you want to include in a slide. For example, if you apply the Normal style to a block of text, Word will not send that text to PowerPoint.
- Open Word.
- On the View menu, click Outline.
- Type your outline, and define the heading levels by using Promote and Demote.
- On the File menu, click Save As.
- In the Save As box, enter the name of the document, and then on the Format pop-up menu, click Rich Text Format (.rtf).
- Click Save.
Step 2: Import the outline to create PowerPoint slides
- Open PowerPoint.
- In the navigation pane, click the slide that you want the outline to appear after.
- On the View menu, click Normal.
- In the top of the navigation pane, click the Slides tab, and then click a slide.
Depending on the width of the navigation pane, you will either see the and named tabs or the Slides and Outline icon tabs.
- On the Home tab, under Slides, click the arrow next to New Slide, and then click Insert Slides from Outline.
- Locate the outline file (.rtf) that you want to insert, and then double-click it.
things that might have been otherwise 