Creating PowerPoint Outlines in Microsoft Word 365 for Windows

An outline encompasses the text content within your presentation slides. In many ways, this text is the story or the structure of your presentation and forms 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 several versions of Microsoft Word.

Follow these steps to create an outline for your PowerPoint presentation using Microsoft Word 365 for Windows:

1. Launch a new Word document, as shown in Figure 1.
2. 
   Figure 1: Word 2016 document
2. 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.
3. 
   Figure 2: Text content for your slides
3. Now, access the Home tab of the Ribbon. Then within the Styles group, click the dialog launcher, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 3.
4. 
   Figure 3: Dialog launcher within the Styles group
4. This brings up the Styles pane, as shown in Figure 4.
5. 
   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 the Heading 1 style.
2. For first level bullets (or subtitles in a title slide), select the text and choose the Heading 2 style.
3. For the second level bullets, select the text and choose the Heading 3 style.
4. For any subsequent levels of bullets (third, fourth, 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 applying styles, your outline may look like what you see in Figure 5 (compare Figures 2 and 5).
7. 
   Figure 5: Text content for your slides after adding styles
7. One aspect that we 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 may be some important, non-textual info in a presentation: this could be a picture, a chart, a table, or something else. In that case, you can indicate a reference within the outline. Just make it stand out a little different as shown in Figure 6. You'll notice that we added some text to indicate that a table has to be added to a particular slide, and it is within parentheses.
8. 
   Figure 6: Indicate 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 – we show you how you can import outlines in PowerPoint 365. And, to learn how to import this outline into various versions of PowerPoint look here: Outlines: Import.