PowerPoint Makeover 7: No Bullets Presentation
By: Geetesh Bajaj
Page 2 of 4
Date Created: November 29th 2007
Last Updated: February 27th 2009
Create a Slide from Each Bullet
Change the Slide Layout
Create a Slide from Each Bullet
Because you want text on every slide kept to a minimum, you really can't have four or five bullets on each slide. Thus, we are going to make all those bullets into individual slides; the bullets themselves will get promoted to slide titles. That's the best promotion any bullet can get!
If you are following the makeover step by step, continue using your saved presentation. If you just stepped in, you can use the nobullets_01.pptx presentation from the Makeover 07\Steps folder on the CD.
Follow these steps:
- Make sure that the Home tab on the Ribbon is active. Click the
Outline tab of the Slides pane so that you can see the entire text
outline of the presentation, as shown in Figure 8.4.

Figure 8.4 The outline is here.
- As you can see in Figure 8.4, there are way too many bullets in the
slides. On the Outline pane, select all the bullets on one of the slides
(see Figure 8.5), and press Shift+Tab on your keyboard (see Figure 8.6).

Figure 8.5 Promoting bullets to slide titles.

Figure 8.6 All thumbnails represent slides.
- Lo and behold, all those bullets now are individual slide titles (see
the "after" image in Figure 8.5). Repeat step 2 for all the
bullets in the rest of the slides to end up with a presentation bereft
of bullets. The 9-slide presentation now has 35 slides and may have still
more by the time we are done.
- Save the presentation.
Change the Slide Layout
Because we have almost no text other than the slide titles on any slide, it makes no sense to retain the Slide Layout that includes bulleted text. So now I'll show you how you can change the layout of all slides to the Title Only layout.
If you are following the makeover step by step, continue using your saved presentation. If you just stepped in, you can use the nobullets_02.pptx presentation from the Makeover 07\Steps folder on the CD.
Follow these steps:
- Click the View tab on the Ribbon, and click
Slide Sorter. This shows all the slides in Slide Sorter view,
and you can see the presentation as thumbnails (see Figure
8.6).

Figure 8.7 A drop-down gallery of layouts makes it easy to change Slide Layouts.
- Press Ctrl+A to select all
the slides in the view, click the Home tab on the Ribbon, and click
the Layout button to view the Layout gallery that you can see in Figure
8.7.
- Click the Title Only thumbnail
(refer to Figure 8.7). This will change the layout of all selected
slides in the presentation to Title Only.
- To view the presentation
in the conventional edit mode, click the View tab on the Ribbon, and
click Normal. Save the presentation.
