Why you Should Use Outline View in Microsoft PowerPoint

Not many people know that you can create a PowerPoint presentation directly from an outline in bullet point form. In this article, Mark Finney, Co-Founder and Facilitator at Keystroke Learning, discusses the advantages of working in Outline View in PowerPoint. It’s one of those features that can save loads of time, while improving the flow of your presentations.

In a recent article, I discussed the benefits of Outline View in Word. It’s a great feature, and one that’s worth checking out, but it’s not well known that Microsoft PowerPoint also has this feature.

As much as I have used PowerPoint over the course of many years, I still find at times it can be a bit cumbersome to work with, and I reckon the main problem is the default view. This is where Outline View comes in. It’s an underused feature that many users don’t know even exists! Let’s remedy that.

What is Outline View?

In my experience, the way most people create their presentations goes something like this:

Step 1: Start with a blank slide.
Step 2: Add a heading and a subheading.
Step 3: Mess around with the font and font size.
Step 4: Spend 15 minutes looking for just the right picture for the slide.
Step 5: Create slide 2 – repeat steps 2 – 4.

Pretty inefficient, but also pretty typical!

I think the key issue here lies in the fact that whenever you start building a new PowerPoint presentation, you’re starting in the default Normal View. Because this view presents you with a great big blank slide and a couple of placeholders, it tends to immediately get you thinking about layout and design. There’s even the Designer pane on the right, just tempting you to start adding design elements to your slide. Don’t give in to the temptation!

At this stage, your focus really needs to be on the content, structure and flow of your slides, rather than thinking about images and animations, and that’s where Outline View comes in. 

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get your thoughts organised properly before starting on the look and layout of your presentation? Enter Outline view – it’s like a blueprint for your presentation, providing a high-level view of your structure, allowing you to see the key points and content without getting lost in the details. By using an outline to organise your thoughts, you’ll find that you can quickly create a more cohesive presentation that works better for you and your audience.

I like to think in terms of hierarchical levels when creating outlines. The highest level consists of the key topics I want to cover, then I can break down each topic to the specific points I need to make for that topic. Typically, the higher levels become my slide headings, with the points under each topic becoming bullet points on my slides. 

Ok, so how do you go about it?

Creating a PowerPoint Presentation in Outline View

To get started, click the View tab on the ribbon. Then click the Outline View button in the Presentation Views group. This shows your presentation outline on the left of the screen. Now at this stage you’ll still see a great big slide on the right, so I find it best to minimise it by clicking and dragging the vertical divider between the two panes as far to the right as possible. It won’t go all the way, but the goal here is to reduce the slide on the right to a thumbnail. Doing so helps to take your focus away from the visual aspect and on to the content, where it should be. Presentation experts are always telling us that “Content is King”, so let’s pay attention folks!

I also like to zoom into the Outline a bit with a “Control and Roll”, clicking anywhere in the Outline pane, then pressing the Ctrl key while rolling the mouse wheel forward. If your mouse doesn’t have a wheel, you can zoom in using the Zoom button on the View tab.

Now we’re here, the next step is to type the first slide heading next to the slide icon at the top left. Pressing the Enter key creates a new Title and Content slide, which is the default for every slide after the first. 

Ok, here’s where it gets good! Type your next slide heading, then press Enter again. Now, you probably don’t want a new slide just yet, but a bullet point on the slide you just made. To fix this, after pressing Enter, press the Tab key. This moves you to a lower level of content, and it’s called “demoting”, while moving up a level is called, you guessed it, “promoting”.

There are other ways to do this using right click to open the shortcut menu, but why bother when using the keyboard is so much quicker? All you need to remember is Tab to demote, and Shift + Tab to promote. The highest level you can promote to is a slide title.

Continue adding slides to build your presentation, promoting and demoting the content as needed. If you need to add another slide, just click to the right of the title and press Enter. Clicking to the right of a bullet point and pressing Enter, adds a new bullet point at the same level. It can be promoted or demote just the same.

Once your outline is done, you can switch back to Normal View to add the bells and whistles (or animated gifs if you’re into that sort of thing)! The point is, you freed up a ton of time by using an outline, so now you can afford to have a bit of fun!

Collapsing and Expanding Content in the Outline

If your presentation has lots of slides, or you just need to get a better sense of the larger structure, then Outline View has you covered. PowerPoint enables you to collapse or expand the outline as you need.  Collapsing the outline simply hides the body text of your presentation so you can focus on the key points. Expanding will show the entire presentation again.

You can choose to collapse a single slide, or your entire presentation.

To collapse the whole thing, right click anywhere in the outline, then from the shortcut menu, select Collapse > Collapse All.

To collapse a single slide, right click in the slide, and from the shortcut menu, select Collapse. 

To expand, bring up the shortcut menu again, then choose Expand, or Expand All for the whole outline.

Moving Content in the Outline

 I often find myself moving slides or bullet points around in my slide deck to change the flow of the presentation. This may be based on what I know about the needs of my audience. To rearrange content, I do the following:

In Outline View, start by collapsing the content if required. Then right click on the slide to be moved, and from the shortcut menu, select Move Up, or Move Down. This also works for bullet points. Leave the slides expanded, then select the bullet point to move and follow the steps above.

Another way to move content in an outline is to collapse the slides, then simply drag them up or down to where you need them. Just a small word or caution here: make sure you drag them directly up or down. If you drag to the right or left, you may find that you’ve accidentally demoted or promoted the content! If that happens, undo (Ctrl + Z) is your friend.

Can I use an Outline with an Existing Presentation?

You bet! In fact, there are a couple of reasons to do so. Maybe you inherited a presentation from a colleague (‘coz that’s always fun), and you want to see the big picture. Just switch over to Outline View and you’ll see the presentation in all its glory. Hopefully, your teammate had a good idea of what they were doing, but it’s likely you will see some “interesting” stuff as well.

For example, something I see all the time, is textboxes added to blank slides and used to type in headings. The problem is they won’t be displayed in the outline because they’re not proper headings. That’s what the placeholders are for people! It’s highly likely you will see stuff like this with inherited slides, and Outline View is a great way to spot them and fix them before you’re standing in front of a crowd with a lump in your throat.

Even if it turns out that your colleague is a PowerPoint guru and all is good in the world, or at least with their PowerPoint slide deck, you might just need to add a few extra slides or bullet points, and the outline is your best friend for doing so. By the way, if you want you can even print a presentation in Outline View if you want.

Importing a Word Outline into Microsoft PowerPoint

Let’s have a look at another way you can make use of outlining. I often see people reinventing the wheel by opening a Microsoft Word document that has the information they are going to be presenting (a report, for example), and then typing up the headings and key points in another screen with PowerPoint open. How many times have you done this yourself? Of course, you know I’m about to point out a better way to do this!

To start with, you will need a document that has been set up correctly using heading styles. 

In PowerPoint, make sure you’re in the outline, then from the Home ribbon, select New Slide > Slides from Outline. In the Insert Slides dialog box, select the document with the content you want, then click the Insert button. After a few moments, the content is inserted into your presentation. Any content in the document using Heading 1 style will become a slide title, with Heading 2 and Heading 3 becoming bullet points under the main titles. Magic huh! Or pretty handy at the very least!

Conclusion

Using Outline View in Microsoft PowerPoint is a brilliant way to improve your slide creation and editing process.

It simplifies the process of organising and structuring presentations, making it easier to rearrange slides to ensure a logical flow.

It improves the efficiency of editing your slides by enabling you to easily collapse and expand individual sections, or the entire slide deck.

Outline View also allows you to repurpose existing content from Microsoft Word documents, saving time and ensuring consistency.

By working with Outline View, you can improve your workflow, focus, and overall productivity when working with slide presentations. I reckon you should do yourself a favour by trying it our next time you start creating your next PowerPoint masterpiece.

P.S. You can also use Outline View in Microsoft Word. Check out the article.