Personally, I think the easiest way to enter the text for a slide presentation is to simply get it from a Word 2000 document. PowerPoint offers a special command for doing just that: the Insert menu’s Slides from Outline command. If you think about it, headings in a Word document are very much like text in a presentation—headings hit the high points and announce the topic that is under review.
To insert headings from a Word document, you must have assigned styles to the headings (styles are explained in Chapter 9). As Figure 17-10 shows, headings assigned the Heading 1 style become slide titles in a presentation; all headings beyond Heading 2 headings are put in bulleted lists, with each kind of heading—Heading 3, 4, and so on—indented farther form the left margin. PowerPoint ignores text that wasn't assigned a heading style and does not bring it into the presentation along with the headings. In Figure 17-10, the Word document is shown in Outline view. You can see what happened to the headings when they were turned into a PowerPoint slide by looking on the right side of the figure. PowerPoint creates one slide for each Heading 1 in the Word document.
Follow these steps to use the headings from a Word document in a PowerPoint presentation:
1. Either create a new Word document and write the headings or open the Word document whose headings you want for a PowerPoint presentation.
2. Choose View | Outline to see the headings only.
3. If necessary, write or edit the headings. Be sure to assign a heading style to each one.
4. Save the document.
5. Switch to PowerPoint and either create a new presentation or place the cursor at the point in a presentation where you want to import headings from the Word document.
6. Choose Insert | Slides from Outline. You see the Insert Outline dialog box.
7. Find and click on the Word document whose headings you want to import.
8. Click the Insert button.
NOTE: The first time you insert a Word document into a PowerPoint slide, PowerPoint will need to install a converter so that it can convert the file to a format that PowerPoint can use. You’ll be asked to insert your Office 2000 CD.