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Before We Begin
All examples and ideas illustrated within this article were duplicated using
Microsoft Word 2002 and PowerPoint 2002, both components of the Office XP suite.
The techniques should work similarly for the last two versions of both programs—but
they haven't been tested by me. Having said that, let us proceed with the rest
of this article.
Getting Started
Microsoft Word often acts as a storyboard in the foundation stage of a concept.
It is quite normal to find people creating plans and jotting inspirations in
Word to form outlines which can be refined and fine-tuned to be used later as
content for brochures, press releases and presentations. In this article, we'll
discuss ideas that help create complete presentations within PowerPoint from
suitable Word content.
Microsoft provides an easy way to create PowerPoint presentations from Word
documents as long as you have both programs installed on the same machine. Within
Word's File menu, you'll find an option called Send To/Microsoft PowerPoint.
This opens up PowerPoint with a basic presentation that contains text elements
contained within the Word document. If you just tried this procedure using a
Word document you already have, you might be quite unhappy with the results.
That's because PowerPoint understands only a distinct style of formatting within
a Word document—such formatting is automatically converted to PowerPoint
titles, text and bulleted items.
An Exercise
Let's create a sample Word outline to illustrate the point.
Open Word and type the following:
Slide 1
Line 1
Line 2
Line 3
Save the document and choose File/Send To/Microsoft PowerPoint. PowerPoint
will launch in the background and present you with at least 4 slides with titles
that match our 4 lines—that's not what we required!
The Correct Way
Close PowerPoint and get back to the Word document. Select the first line that
contains the words Slide 1. Choose the Heading 1 option from the
Styles drop down menu on Word's Formatting toolbar (or via the
Format/Styles menu). Similarly, select the remaining three lines and choose
the Heading 2 style from Styles. Save your Word document and
choose File/Send To/Microsoft PowerPoint. If you followed all the steps
correctly, you'll find that PowerPoint has created a single slide presentation
with one title and three bullets in the text area—exactly like a conventional
presentation!
You can create multiple titles and bullets in Word using the Heading 1 and
Heading 2 styles, alternatively, for all your content. This in turn will
translate into multiple slides within a PowerPoint presentation.
More Options
We just learned that the Word to PowerPoint conversion converts Word styles
into PowerPoint elements. The Heading 1 style translates into the Title Text
designation in PowerPoint. Similarly, the Heading 2 style changes into Bullet
1.
Similarly:
Heading 3 becomes Bullet 2 (a sub-bullet)
Heading 4 becomes Bullet 3 (a sub-bullet of a sub-bullet) and so on…
Note!
Any text in your Word document (with styles applied) which is set with the
Normal style will not import into PowerPoint.
A quick way to change Word formatting is to apply the Heading 2 style to an
entire document. Thereafter, apply the Heading 1 style to whichever part of
the document you want designated as a Title Text within PowerPoint.
You'll find more information in this Microsoft's knowledge base article:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;en-us;q198212
Finally
Presentations created with Word outlines are basic in nature, containing plain
text content using a default font style in black over a white background slide.
It would be a very rare occasion when you would want to display your presentation
in such a bare state.
The easiest way to provide a sophisticated look to such a presentation would
be to choose Format/Slide Design (in PowerPoint 2002) or Format/Apply
Design Template (in PowerPoint 97 and 2000).
You'll find several links to
PowerPoint templates you can download or buy online at:
http://www.indezine.com/products/powerpoint/pptemplates.html
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