Import Outlines in PowerPoint 2016 for Mac

Creating outlines for PowerPoint in various external applications lets you stay away from distractions in PowerPoint-land and concentrate on the structure of your slides rather than their appearance. Once you have the outline created, it's very easy to import it in the form of slides into PowerPoint. While this import process works the same way in all versions of PowerPoint, there are small interface changes from version to version.

In this tutorial, we'll show you how to import outlines in PowerPoint 2016 for Mac:

1. Launch PowerPoint and open a new presentation, as shown in Figure 1, below.
2. 
   Figure 1: New presentation in PowerPoint 2016 for Mac
2. Access the Home tab of the Ribbon and click the down-arrow within the New Slide button, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 2, below. Doing so brings up the New Slide drop-down gallery, as shown in Figure 2. Within this gallery, select the Outline option, as shown highlighted in blue within Figure 2.
3. 
   Figure 2: Outline option
3. Doing so will open the Choose a File dialog box, as shown in Figure 3, below. Navigate to select the outline file you need and click on the Insert button.
4. 
   Figure 3: Choose a File dialog box

Outline Formats

The outlines that PowerPoint imports can be text files, Word documents, or RTF documents. Older versions of WordPerfect may also be supported.
4. This will import the outlines into PowerPoint as slides, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 4, below. Do note that this process only adds slides to an existing presentation, and does not replace any existing slides (you can still see the empty, first slide from Figure 1).
5. 
   Figure 4: PowerPoint presentation after importing slides from outline
Tip:
In this example, we imported an outline created in Word 2016 for Mac. To change the text to follow the formatting specified in your PowerPoint template or Theme, access Slide Sorter view and select all slides (press the ⌘+A keyboard shortcut), and click the Reset button found on the Home tab of the Ribbon.
5. Select the View tab of the Ribbon and click the Outline View button, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 5, below. This will access Outline View, as shown in Figure 5. You can see all the text from the outline. This same text also shows up in slides as Text Placeholders.
6. 
   Figure 5: Outline View of the slides imported
6. Save the presentation often.