---

---

Outlines are stories that contain sequential structures of any text content that you use in a presentation. In many respects, an outline is more like a script for a movie production than a bunch of slides -- however, it does form an ideal starting point for a bunch of slides! PowerPoint can import outlines created in many applications and we have already shown you how you can create outlines for PowerPoint presentations in Word 2003 and Word 2007. In this tutorial, we'll explore the procedure of creating a structured outline in Word 2010.

Follow these steps to create an outline for your PowerPoint presentation using Microsoft Word 2010 for Windows:

1. Launch a new Word document (see Figure 1).
   
   
   Figure 1: Word 2010 document
   
   
2. Now type in all the text content you want within your slide titles and text placeholders on separate lines, as shown in Figure 2. If you don't know what a text placeholder in PowerPoint is, look here.
   
   
   Figure 2: Text content for your slides
   
   
3. Access the Home tab of the Ribbon. Within the Styles group, click the small box at the bottom right (see Figure 3 highlighted in red).
   
   
   Figure 3: Styles
   
   
4. This opens the Styles pane that you can see in Figure 4.
   
   
   Figure 4: Styles pane
   
   
5. Now you can format the outline so that PowerPoint can understand which line of text is a slide title, the first level bullet, the second level bullet, etc. To do that you need to follow these guidelines:
   
   
   1. For slide titles, select the text and choose Heading 1 style.
      
      
   2. For first level bullets (or subtitles in a title slide), select the text and choose Heading 2 style.
      
      
   3. For the second level bullets, select the text and choose Heading 3 style.
      
      
   4. For any subsequent levels of bullets (fourth, fifth, etc.), select the text that you want to format, and apply the Heading style of that level (Heading 4, Heading 5, etc).
      
6. Once you are done adding styles, your outline may look like what you see in Figure 5 (compare to Figure 2).
   
   
   Figure 5: Text content for your slides after adding styles
   
   
7. One aspect that I want to draw your attention to is that you can only add the text content for a presentation within an outline -- however at times, there is some very important info in a presentation that is not text -- it could be a picture, a chart, a table, or something else. In that case, you can mention that within the outline -- just make it stand out a little different as shown in Figure 6 -- you'll notice that I added some text to indicate that a table has to be added to a particular slide, and it is within parentheses.
   
   
   Figure 6: Indicating non-textual content within parentheses
   
   
8. Save your Word file. This outline is now in a format that PowerPoint can import, and create new slides.
   

---

---