Import text from Word or Notepad

Recently, a friend told me he sometimes copied and pasted text from a Microsoft Office Word document into PowerPoint and then changed the size, color, and so on on every slide.

You should never have to do that.

You can import text from Word or even Notepad (or any text editor) to create a new presentation. This is called importing an outline. Follow these steps to create the outline:

Open a Word or Notepad document.
Type the content if you haven’t already done so, following the guildines below.
Make sure each line, whether for a slide title or bulleted text, is on its own line. There should be no blank lines, because these come in as blank slides!
Before each line of bulleted text, insert a tab.
To create 2nd-level bulleted text, insert two tabs.
Save the file as a .doc or .txt file.

Here’s an example:

Word or Notepad document

To use the outline, follow these steps:

Start a new presentation.

Choose File > Open.
From the Files of Type drop-down list, choose All Outlines.
Find your file, select it, and click Open.

That’s it! Your presentation is created! Here’s an example. The only change I made was to use the Title Slide layout for the first slide.

presentation slides created

As you can see, the text comes in the appropriate size, according to the slide master.

You can also insert an outline into an existing presentation. Perhaps you have some content that you want to use for just a couple of slides. Follow these steps:

On the Outline tab of the Outline pane, click the slide you want the outline content to appear after.
Choose insert > Slides from Outline.
Select your outline file and click Insert.

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Katri Laine-Murhu

November 18, 2011 at 9:00 am

Hi!

Thank you for the advice – it was something I could not find in Office Help!

I still have a problem: all my lines come out as page headings in Power Point no matter how many tabs I put in front on them in Word or Notepad. What could be the solution?

Ellen

November 18, 2011 at 3:39 pm

Have you tried Notepad? In Word, you can try using Heading1 (for slide titles) and Heading2 (for bulleted text). Notepad is more reliable.

Andrew

December 4, 2011 at 11:31 am

I was having the same problem with my text file, (everything saving to one slide)

I am using a Mac and changed the settings on the text file to save with Windows Line Endings (CRLF)

After that it worked fine.

December 4, 2011 at 9:17 pm

I’m glad you figured out how to do that. I had someone do some work for me that involved text files and she was on a Mac. The lines always ran together.