Creating PowerPoint Outlines in Microsoft Word 2010 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 Word 2007 and Word 2003.

Follow these steps to create an outline for your PowerPoint presentation using Microsoft Word 2010 for Windows:

1. Launch a new Word document, as shown in Figure 1, below.
2. 
   Figure 1: Word 2010 document
2. Now, type in all the text content you want within your slide titles and text placeholders on separate lines, as shown in Figure 2, below. If you do not know what a text placeholder in PowerPoint is, look at our Text Boxes vs. Placeholders tutorial.
3. 
   Figure 2: Text content for your slides
3. Access the Home tab of the Ribbon. Within the Styles group, click the small box at the bottom right, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 3, below.
4. 
   Figure 3: Styles
4. Doing so opens the Styles pane, as shown in Figure 4, below.
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 so, you need to follow these guidelines:
1. For slide titles, select the text and choose Heading 1 style.
2. For first level bullets (or subtitles in a title slide), select the text and choose Heading 2 style.
3. For the second level bullets, select the text and choose 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 adding styles, your outline may look like what you see in Figure 5, below. Compare with Figure 2.
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. Make it stand out a little different, as shown in Figure 6, below. 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: Indicating 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. To learn how to import this outline into PowerPoint 2010, look at our Import Outlines in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows tutorial. And, to learn how to import this outline into various versions of PowerPoint look here: Outlines: Import.