Create a PowerPoint presentation from a Word outline

You can use a Word document to create a PowerPoint presentation. To set up the slides in a presentation, PowerPoint uses the heading styles in your Word document. For example, each paragraph that is formatted with the Heading 1 style becomes the title of a new slide, and each Heading 2 becomes the first level of text. To make this easy, you can create a document in outline view, which already has headings associated with the text.

Note  You can only import an outline that is saved as a Rich Text Format (.rtf) file.

Step 1: Create an outline in Word

You must apply a heading format to the text that you want to include in a slide. For example, if you apply the Normal style to a block of text, Word will not send that text to PowerPoint.

  1. Open Word.

  2. On the View menu, click Outline.

  3. Type your outline, and define the heading levels by using Promote  Outline promote button and Demote  Outline demote button.

  4. On the File menu, click Save As.

  5. In the Save As box, enter the name of the document, and then on the Format pop-up menu, click Rich Text Format (.rtf).

  6. Click Save.

Step 2: Import the outline to create PowerPoint slides

  1. Open PowerPoint.

  2. In the navigation pane, click the slide that you want the outline to appear after.

    How to select slides in the navigation pane

  3. On the Home tab, under Slides, click the arrow next to New Slide, and then click Insert Slides from Outline.

    Home tab, Slides group

  4. Locate the outline file (.rtf) that you want to insert, and then double-click it.