An outline is a structure and the basis for any presentation, including those created in PowerPoint.. Learn from these resources, about how you can use the outline to create a better presentation in PowerPoint.
Author: Geetesh Bajaj
Product/Version: PowerPoint
OS: Windows and Mac
An outline in PowerPoint has two meanings, that are related yet different:
Although visuals, multimedia, and other slide objects can play an important role within a presentation, a proper text 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, and until PowerPoint 2003, there used to be a very capable Outlining toolbar. And until PowerPoint 2010, there used to a very-visible Outline tab within the default interface. For some reason, Microsoft has done a “great job” of hiding all the Outlining options! Fortunately, those outlining tools are still available, although not as accessible any longer. We'll explore them in these series of tutorials.
But you are not limited to using PowerPoint’s outline tools alone. In many ways, PowerPoint can be quite distracting as an outlining tool because you can go astray formatting fonts, changing backgrounds, or even adding animation, even before your outline is created. So it might be a good idea to create your outline outside PowerPoint. We'll show you how you can do so in these tutorials:
Once your outlines are created, you need to import them within PowerPoint. Visit our Import Outlines in PowerPoint page, and choose your version of PowerPoint.
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