Creating Content by Outlining

You know what you want to tell the audience, and you're now ready to organize your presentation. You could, like most people do, simply jump in and start creating slides. If you do that, you'll soon discover, however, that it's easy to lose sight of what you're trying to accomplish because you get bogged down in details or distracted by bells and whistles that just beg to be used.

In my own experience, confirmed by many presenters and teachers I've worked with, good presentations using PowerPoint require even greater organization and preparation than typical, off-the-cuff boardroom or classroom discussions.

This section explores the use of PowerPoint's outline feature, which helps you create the structure of a presentation before you fill in the details or get lured away from your objectives by the siren call of graphics, animations, and other fancy PowerPoint features.

Organizing Textual Material in Outline Form

PowerPoint's outline feature automates the process of organizing the textual components of a presentation. Consider the following text outline:

1. Plant Safety Discussion

2. Areas of Concern

   1. Production Line

   2. Loading Dock

3. Measuring Results

In a PowerPoint presentation, the main topics listed with Roman numerals in this outline become slide titles. On the second slide you also find two bullet topics, for the A and B points in the outline.

Further, if you add or delete topics, PowerPoint automatically adds or deletes slides or bullets to match your outline. For example, if you need to establish a working committee before measuring the results, you insert a new Point III (Slide 3), and Point III automatically becomes Point IV (Slide 4).

Some slides contain little or no text when you use this method. But creating a text-based outline first, with at least a title for each intended slide, helps you remember where to place all your slides, both textual and visual.

To begin a new slide show using the outline feature, follow these steps:

1. Start PowerPoint.

2. Select the Outline tab at the left of the PowerPoint screen. PowerPoint displays the first slide icon and provides an area where you can type outline text (see Figure 4.3, which shows text already added).

   Figure 4.3. The outline area helps you focus on the content of a presentation without worrying about what it looks like.

   

3. Click just to the right of the first slide icon. PowerPoint displays a blinking insertion point.

4. Type the text of the title of your first slide (for example, Plant Safety Discussion). Note that the text you type appears both in the outline and in the title placeholder on the slide editing screen (refer to Figure 4.3).

You've now created the first major topic in your outline, which also happens to be the title of the title slide in your slide show. You'll enter the subtitle for the first slide in a moment.

Adding New Slides

As you create an outline in PowerPoint, you use certain basic keystrokes to quickly enter and arrange the outline. For example, each time you press the Enter key, PowerPoint adds a new outline item, of the same type as the one you were just working on.

The example shown in Figure 4.3 shows the title of a slide, equivalent to a main outline topic. To insert a new slide (that is, a main topic), you simply press Enter. PowerPoint automatically inserts a new slide, at which point you can type the second main topic the second slide's title (see Figure 4.4).

Figure 4.4. You can press Enter to add a new outline element.

Adding Bullets

At this point in creating a slide show by using the outline feature, you could continue through the entire outline, adding all the major points first, and then return to add the subtopics. Or, you could add subtopics while they're fresh in your mind.

Subtopics in a PowerPoint outline become a slide's bullet points. To add bullet points to a slide, such as Slide 2, follow these steps:

1. Position the insertion point at the end of the title line.

2. Press Enter. PowerPoint adds another slide.

3. Press the Tab key. PowerPoint moves the insertion point to the right, changing Slide 3 to the first bullet for Slide 2 (see Figure 4.5). You can also cause this to happen by clicking the Increase Indent button on the toolbar, but I think you'll soon learn that using the Tab key is much quicker.

   Figure 4.5. You can use the Tab key to move an outline element to the right and convert it to a bullet or subbullet.

   

4. Type the first subtopic, which becomes the text of the first bullet.

The next time you press Enter, PowerPoint gives you another bullet. You can continue to add bullets until the list is complete.

Bullets on a title slide (usually your first slide) are the equivalent to the subtitle. If you position the insertion point at the end of the title text and then press Enter and then Tab, you can type the subtitle information. You can then press Enter and then Shift+Tab to create the second slide, typically a bullet slide.

Changing Outline Levels

You can quickly and easily change outline levels from titles, to bullets, or to subbullets, and back again. For example, earlier in this chapter you changed a title to a bullet by simply pressing the Tab key. When you press Enter, you add another bullet.

Caution

It's tempting to cram as many bullet points as possible onto each slide. It's also easy to get too wordy. To keep your slides visually attractive and easy to remember, limit yourself to only a few, carefully worded bullets.

If you want to start adding slide titles again, follow these steps:

1. After your last slide bullet, press Enter to get a blank bullet.

2. Press Shift+Tab. PowerPoint shifts the bullet to the left and changes it to a slide. You can also accomplish this by clicking the Decrease Indent button on the toolbar, but using Shift+Tab is usually much quicker.

3. Type the slide title and then press Enter to get a new slide, or press Enter and then Tab to get a new bullet.

Editing Outline Material

You edit outline material much as you do any word processing text. You can do things like select, delete, cut and paste, and add or change text attributes such as font, color, or size. You see changes in text content in the outline, but you see changes in formatting only on the slide itself.

Although editing involves making changes to the text, quite often it also involves rearranging and organizing the textual material. For example, suppose you need to add a slide in the middle of the presentation. To insert outline material, you follow these steps:

1. Position the insertion point at the end of the line preceding where you want to insert a new item.

2. Press Enter. PowerPoint inserts the next item, which is the same type (slide or bullet) as the item that precedes it.

3. Press Tab or Shift+Tab to move the item right or left, until it becomes the bullet, subbullet, or slide level you want.

4. Type the text of the inserted item.

You can also quickly rearrange the items in an outline. Consider, for example, Figure 4.6. The Implementation Committee slide lists the committee's various members, but it might be politically wise to place the management member last, to emphasize the importance of worker involvement. To move an outline item, follow these steps:

Figure 4.6. Reorganizing an outline is easy when you use drag and drop.

1. Move the mouse pointer to the icon of the item you want to move (for example, the bullet preceding "One Management Team Member"). The pointer turns to a four-way arrow (refer to Figure 4.6).

2. Click and drag the icon to its new location. PowerPoint displays a horizontal line to indicate where the item will be placed when you release the mouse button (see Figure 4.7).

   Figure 4.7. A horizontal line shows where to drop the outline element you're moving.

   

3. Release the mouse button to drop the item in its new location.

You could, of course, select and cut an outline item and then paste it in its new location. Depending on your keyboard skills and speed, either method may be equally efficient.

You can also rearrange outline levels. For example, if you want to change a bullet to a slide level title, follow these steps:

1. Move the mouse pointer to the icon of the item you want to change. The pointer turns to a four-way arrow.

2. Click and drag the icon left. PowerPoint displays a vertical line to indicate the level the item will become when you release the mouse button (see Figure 4.8).

   Figure 4.8. The vertical line shows what level you're at while you're dragging an outline element.

   

3. Release the mouse button to drop the item at its new level.

And you thought this was going to be hard!

If you want to use the keyboard to change outline levels of existing text, you simply position the insertion point anywhere on the outline item. Then you press Tab or Shift+Tab to move right or left.

Table 4.1 shows a handy summary of ways to manage outline levels and items in PowerPoint's outline screen.

Table 4.1. Managing Outline Levels

Procedure	Options
Add an item	Press Enter to add slides or bullets. Click New Slide to add a new slide (not bullets).
Change a slide title to a bullet	Press Tab. Click Increase Indent. Drag the icon to the right.
Change a bullet to a slide title	Press Shift+Tab. Click Decrease Indent. Drag the icon to the left.
Rearrange the sequence of an outline item	Drag an icon up or down. Cut and paste the outline item.

By now you've become an expert at organizing presentations by using PowerPoint's outline feature. A well-conceived outline is the foundation for a successful presentation. I like to create an outline, let it sit for a while, and then come back to it to see if my fresh eyes see things that need to be changed. Building a presentation is much easier when you have a solid outline.

Making Slides Readable

Text can be an important part of PowerPoint slides, but it's not the only part. If that were the case, you could simply prepare a nice detailed outline, print it, and pass it out to audience members. That certainly would be less costly than a laptop computer and data projector!

To make text on slides as effective as possible, you should consider the following:

• Reduce the amount of text for titles and bullets to the bare essentials. You can fill in the details verbally during your presentation.

• Stick with fonts that are easy to read. Funky fonts may seem cool, but they often require extra effort to read.

• Use colors that provide high contrast between the text and the background. Try out a color scheme, and see what it will look like before you subject your audience to something that might be difficult to read. For example, red text on a dark blue background might seem like a good idea until you actually try it. However, although white backgrounds with dark text provide the highest contrast, audience members' eyes tire quickly when they have to look at a white background. Try choosing darker backgrounds with appropriately contrasting text.

• Make the font size appropriate to the size of the screen and the distance of the audience from the screen. You might get away with smaller fonts (and more text) in a small meeting room, but large fonts with minimal text are called for in a large lecture hall. If you're not sure the size you're using will work, try it out yourself in the room you'll be using.

By default, PowerPoint uses its AutoFit feature to make text fit within its placeholders. Thus, if you continue to add bullets, PowerPoint begins reducing the size of the font to accommodate the extra text. Generally, this is not a good thing for two reasons: The font gets smaller and harder to read, and the size of the fonts from one slide to another becomes inconsistent.

Fortunately, you have several alternatives to letting AutoFit shrink your text. As soon as your text exceeds the capacity of the placeholder, PowerPoint shrinks the text and displays the AutoFit Options icon (see Figure 4.9, which has the AutoFit Options menu already showing).

Figure 4.9. PowerPoint's AutoFit feature shrinks text size if you try to insert too much text.

Move the mouse pointer to the AutoFit Options button and then click its drop-down menu to display the following choices (refer to Figure 4.9):

• Stop Fitting Text to This Placeholder When you select this option, the font does not change, and extra text disappears off the edge of the placeholder.

• Split Text Between Two Slides When you select this option, extra text is moved to a new slide.

• Change to a Two- Column Layout When you select this option, the items are presented in two columns. Bullet items with minimal text often work well arranged in two columns instead of on two separate slides.

If you try an AutoFit option and don't like it, you can click Undo to restore the original slide and then try something else.

Importing Outline Material from Word

You can use outline text from Word to create outlines in PowerPoint. There are two concerns with doing this, however:

• Word text must be properly formatted before it imports cleanly to the PowerPoint outline format. This is difficult, at best.

• Word outlines typically tend to be wordy, if you'll pardon the pun. You'll probably have to trim the Word text to make it work as PowerPoint text.

If you already have text in Word format that you'd like to use in a PowerPoint slide, it's probably easiest to simply copy from Word and paste into PowerPoint's outline area. You then can edit titles and bullets as necessary. However, I prefer to create entirely new title and bullet text, very much condensed from my original Word material.