Building a Presentation Outline in PowerPoint 2010

Working with Outline Contents

Once you enter your contents in your outline and demote and promote headings to create an outline structure, you might want to work with the outline contents in various ways. For example, at times you might want to view just the slide titles; at other times, you want to see all the detailed headings. You might also want to move headings around in an outline to reorganize the content.

Finally, text formatting is shown by default in an outline, but you can turn it off and back on easily, which can come in handy as you edit and review your slides.

Expand and Collapse the Outline

1. Click the Outline tab to display it, and then right-click a slide.

2. Do either of the following to collapse the outline:

   • Choose Collapse to hide all the subheads for this slide title.

   • Choose Collapse All to hide all the subheads for the presentation.

   

3. Do either of the following to expand the outline:

   • Choose Expand to display all the subheads for this slide title.

   • Choose Expand All to display all subheads in the presentation.

   

Try This!

In a longer presentation, collapse headings for slides that you’ve finished working on to speed up scrolling through your outline to find information you need. When you are ready to view all your contents again, right-click in the Outline tab and choose Expand, Expand All.

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Collapsing or expanding your outline has no effect on what appears in the Slide pane or on what appears when you give your slide presentation. A presentation in which you have collapsed the outline still shows all headings at every level when you display Slide Show view.

Move Slides or Text Up and Down in an Outline

1. Right-click the line of text or right-click and drag to select multiple lines of text that you want to move.

2. Choose Move Up or Move Down from the shortcut menu. The selected line or lines move one line up or down together.

   

3. To move an entire slide, you can drag the slide icon to a new position in the outline. A line appears, indicating the position of the text as you drag.

   

SEE ALSO

For information about editing text in slides, see Edit Text.

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If slide subheads are collapsed under the title and you move the title, all subheads move along with their slide title. If you don’t want to move a subhead, you must first expand the slide and either move the subhead to another family of headings (by cutting and pasting it elsewhere) or promote it to be a slide title on its own.

Turn Formatting On and Off in an Outline

1. Right-click anywhere in the Outline tab.

2. Choose Show Text Formatting from the shortcut menu.

3. To return text to the way it was, right-click in the Outline tab and choose Show Text Formatting again.

   

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Showing formatting in the outline is a good way to see whether you have a balance of fonts or formats such as bold in your presentation and to confirm that you have kept text formatting consistent overall. Another good way to view this is to display Slide Sorter view.

Insert a Word Outline into PowerPoint

1. Choose New from the File menu; click Blank Presentation and then click the Create button.

   

2. If necessary, add the Slides From Outline button to the Quick Access Toolbar (click the Customize Quick Access Toolbar button, choose More Commands, click Slides From Outline, click Add, and then click OK) and then click it.

3. In the Insert Outline dialog box, locate the Word document you want to use, and click Open. The outline content appears as slides in the blank presentation.

   

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You can also cut text from the PowerPoint Outline pane and paste it into Word to create a Word outline from it.