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You've probably noticed that most PowerPoint presentations consist of slide after slide of bulleted lists, punctuated with an occasional bit of clip art for visual relief. So how do you highlight the structure of your presentation when the slides are all so similar? You can either expand and collapse the outline or create a Summary Slide.
Expanding and collapsing the outline
 | If your presentation has many slides, you may find that grasping its overall structure is difficult, even when looking at the outline. Fortunately, PowerPoint enables you to collapse the outline so that only the slide titles are shown. Collapsing an outline doesn't delete the body text; it merely hides the body text so that you can focus on the order of the slides in your presentation. |
Expanding a presentation restores the collapsed body text to the outline so that you can once again focus on details. You can collapse and expand an entire presentation, or you can collapse and expand one slide at a time.
To collapse the entire presentation, click the Collapse All button in the Outlining toolbar or use the keyboard shortcut Alt+Shift+1. To expand the presentation, click the Expand All button or press Alt+Shift+9.
To collapse a single slide, position the cursor anywhere in the slide that you want to collapse. Then click the Collapse button or press Alt+Shift+– (the minus sign). If you prefer, right-click the slide title and choose Collapse from the menu that appears.
To expand a single slide, click anywhere in the slide title, and then click the Expand button or press Alt+Shift++ (the plus sign). Or, right-click the slide title and choose Expand from the menu.
Creating a Summary Slide
PowerPoint's Summary Slide button is a nifty feature. It automatically creates a summary slide that shows the titles of some or all the slides in your presentation. To use the Summary Slide feature, follow these steps:
1. Select the slides whose titles you want to appear on the summary slide.
To include the entire presentation, press Ctrl+A to select all the slides.
2. Click the Summary Slide button, which you find on the Outlining toolbar.
If the Outlining toolbar is not visible, summon it by choosing View --> Toolbars --> Outlining.
A summary slide is created at the beginning of the selected slides, as shown in Figure 1.
3. Change the title of the summary slide.
Unless, of course, you like the exciting title "Summary Slide."
Figure 1: Can you say "summary slide" ten times, very fast?
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