Organizing with Outlines and Notes

The Importance of the Outline
As I noted, text we create in the title and bullet placeholders is directly reflected in the Outline panel, and you can just as easily add new text—for title or bullets—within the Outline panel.

There's no question that text is the intellectual skeleton of your presentation. Even if your presentation is composed entirely of images or even movies (options we'll investigate in the coming hours), you would probably organize them thematically using text, perhaps with an outline in Microsoft Word.

In most cases, you'll use PowerPoint to present important information—to persuade, teach, or inspire—and how you structure your presentation will be a large factor in the success of your project.

We've already seen how the Title slide sets the tone for your presentation. It's a good idea to use the Outline panel to at least conceptualize the following:

Introduction

Main concepts (substance of talk)

Beginning

Middle

End

Action items—what to take away—anticipated results

Summary—Close

As we'll see in the coming hours on content, clearly defining even these basic sections enables you to use other elements, such as tables, charts, images, and media, most effectively by putting them in the proper context.
Opening the Outline Panel
To make sure that it's available for you, click the tab at the top of Outline or Slides thumbnail. This gives you access to a hierarchical view of the titles and bullets within your slides in Outline view.

To be accessed in the Outline view, text must be in either a title or bullet placeholder. Text boxes are not included in the outline, as shown in Figure 4.1. To switch from the Slides panel to the Outline panel, click the Outline tab.

Accessing the Outlining Toolbar
To take full advantage of the Outline panel, you should open the Outlining toolbar. Select View, Toolbars, Outlining (refer to Figure 4.3). The Outlining toolbar pops up next to the Outline panel as shown in Figure 4.2
Working with the Outline Hierarchy
With the Outline panel open, you can begin to manipulate your key concepts as titles and bullets. You can create these elements and quickly generate new title and bullet slides.

One thing we haven't done so far is to create a sub-bullet. With your cursor in the text of one of the bullets, click the demote bullet arrow, as shown in Figure 4.4.

To promote the bullet back to a main bullet, click the Promote Bullet arrow. It returns to a first-level bullet. What do you suppose happens if you promote a first-level bullet? Let's try it.

If you thought that the bullet would become a title for a subsequent slide, you were right. Look at Figure 4.5
As you might have noticed, when a first-level bullet is promoted to a title in a new slide, subordinate bullets are not automatically promoted.

To get the subordinate bullets to be promoted in the proper levels, select and highlight multiple bullets and sub-bullets before clicking the Promote Bullet arrow.





To use the Outlining toolbar in this way, the cursor must be in the outline, but you can also demote and promote bullets directly within a slide (except that you can't promote to a new slide title).

You can also demote bullets in the outline or within a slide's bullet placeholder by pressing the Tab key. You can promote them by pressing Shift+Tab