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An outline within a PowerPoint presentation is all the text content of the presentation that's inserted within any of the text placeholders. If you want to know what a text placeholder is, and how it is different from the other text boxes you see on a PowerPoint slide, check out these tutorials:

Text Placeholders vs. Text Boxes in PowerPoint 2003 for Windows
Text Placeholders vs. Text Boxes in PowerPoint 2007 for Windows
Text Placeholders vs. Text Boxes in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows
Text Placeholders vs. Text Boxes in PowerPoint 2008 for Mac
Text Placeholders vs. Text Boxes in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac

Although visuals, multimedia, and other slide objects can play an important role within a presentation, a proper outline is still the main skeleton on which the body of a presentation can be sustained. Without a cohesive outline, everything else is akin to a movie that has the best photography, great music, talented cast but no story to put it all together. So how do you create a structured outline -- and does PowerPoint provide sufficiently robust outlining tools?

Yes, PowerPoint has great outlining tools -- until PowerPoint 2003, there used to be a very capable Outlining toolbar but what sort of wisdom made Microsoft remove the Outlining toolbar without providing the same options on the Ribbon is a big mystery -- probably they thought structured presentations were not too important! Those outlining tools are still available thought, although not as accessible in PowerPoint 2007 and later versions, and we'll explore them in these series of tutorials.

However PowerPoint can be quite distracting as an outling tool because rarely do PowerPoint designers concentrate solely on the outline and not go atsray formatting fonts, changing backgrounds, or even adding animation -- yes PowerPoint can be like a candy store with distractions and temptations galore. So it might be a good idea to create your outline outside PowerPoint -- and I'll show you how you can do that in these tutorials:

1. Creating PowerPoint Outlines in Notepad (Windows)
2. Creating PowerPoint Outlines in TextEdit (Mac OS X)
3. Creating PowerPoint Outlines in Word 2003 (Windows)
4. Creating PowerPoint Outlines in Word 2007 (Windows)
5. Creating PowerPoint Outlines in Word 2010 (Windows)
6. Creating PowerPoint Outlines in Word 2008 (Mac OS X)
7. Creating PowerPoint Outlines in Excel (Just to prove a point!)
8. Creating PowerPoint Outlines on the iPhone or iPad
9. Creating PowerPoint Outlines in WordPerfect
   

Once your outlines are created, you need to import it within PowerPoint -- choose your version of PowerPoint:

1. Import Outlines in PowerPoint 2003 (Windows)
2. Import Outlines in PowerPoint 2007 (Windows)
3. Import Outlines in PowerPoint 2010 (Windows)
4. Import Outlines in PowerPoint 2008 (Mac OS X)

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