Outlining Toolbar
Author: Geetesh Bajaj
Product/Version: PowerPoint 2002 and 2003
Date Created: August 3rd 2006
Last Updated: February 26th 2009
Excerpt/Capsule:
PowerPoint provides many toolbars, and these can be handy for one-click operations. But since there are so many toolbars, you might not have all of them visible, or maybe you have also created a customized toolbar. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to use the Outlining toolbar.
The Outlining toolbar helps organize the title and text content of the slides -- in other words, it just works with the outline of the presentation. This can be a good thing, since this makes it easier to organize your outline -- in the process, you can add or merge slides, and do much more.
Here's a quick tutorial on using the Outlining toolbar:
- Open any presentation in PowerPoint, or download the Indezine sample presentation...
- Make sure that the left pane of the PowerPoint interface shows the outlining tab as you can see in Figure 1. Remember -- this screenshot uses PowerPoint 2003, and earlier versions were slightly different.
Figure 1 : Outlining Tab
- As you can see in Figure 1, the entire outline of the presentation comprising the title and text placeholders is shown in the Outline pane. Most of the edits you make to this content in the outlining pane works best with the Outlining toolbar. Let's explore this toolbar.
- If you are not able to see the Outlining toolbar, it might be hidden -- to make it visible choose View | Toolbars | Outlining as shown in Figure 2.
To learn more, see Hide/Show Toolbars
Figure 2 : Toolbars
- Figure 3 shows you the Outlining toolbar -- remember that all the options in the Outlining toolbar works only if the Outline pane (shown in Figure 1) is visible.
Figure 3: Outlining toolbar options
Here's what these buttons do:
- Promote: Changes the selected line to the previous level.
For example, if you select the text of the second level bullet and apply promote the text will be converted to first level bullet.
Similarly, if applied to first level bullet, it will be converted to the slide title. Naturally, if you already have a slide title in place, you'll end up with two slides.
- Demote: Changes the selected line or slide title to a lower level.
For example, if you select the text of the first level bullet and click the Demote button, the text will be converted to a second level bullet.
Similarly, a slide title gets demoted to a first level bullet.
- Move Up: Moves up the selected slide title to one slide above.
Similarly, if a bullet level is selected, this options moves that bullet level above in the same slide.
- Move Down: Moves down the selected slide title to one slide below.
Similarly, if a bullet level is selected, this options moves that bullet level below in the same slide.
- Collapse: Hides the body text of the selected slide.
- Expand: Displays all the body text of the selected slide.
- Collapse All: Hides body text of all the slides in the presentation.
- Expand All: Displays body text of all the slides in the presentation.
- Summary Slide: First select the slides that you want, and then click this button so that PowerPoint can creates a summarized slide that contains all the slide titles.
To create a summary slide of all slides, select all them in the Outline pane (Ctrl+A), and then click this button.
- Show Formatting: Shows all the text formatting done in the actual presentation in outline view. For example, you can see the actual font you used.
Note: Outlining options once applied can be edited using the same options, as explained above.
