Outline Pane Options in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows

Introducing the Slides/Outline Pane
Outline Pane Options

Introducing the Slides/Outline Pane

The Slides/Outline pane in PowerPoint 2010 looks and works almost the same as it did in previous versions. Unfortunately Microsoft took away the Outlining toolbar in PowerPoint 2007 and provided no replacement commands in any Ribbon tab, this state of affairs continues in PowerPoint 2010. Yes, this does mean that most of the outline tasks now have to be accessed through right-click options, and we'll show you how you can do that.

As shown in Figure 1, the Slides/Outline pane is normally placed on the left side of the interface. In Figure 1, the Slides tab is selected, but to get to the Outline tab, all you need to do is select the tab.

Figure 1: Slide/Outline pane

You can learn more about the Slide/Outline Pane in another tutorial, this one builds on it, and explores the various outline options available in PowerPoint 2010.

Outline Pane Options

The Outline tab typically displays the title and text content of the slides, as shown in Figure 2. The content shown here is what you insert in the text placeholders of a slide.

Figure 2: Outline tab

Getting back to the outline, you can use the Outline pane to change bullet hierarchies, change bullets to titles, and the other way around. You can also reorder the slides, or move bullets from one slide to another fairly quickly.

Whatever you might need to do, the first thing you need to do is select the text for which you want to effect a change. Thereafter, with the text still selected, right click anywhere in the Outline tab of the pane to bring up the options in the context menu, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Outline Tab Edit Options

All the options related to outlining that you see in Figure 3 above are explained in the next page of this tutorial.

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