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The bread and butter of PowerPoint presentations is the bulleted list. It sounds boring, but it's often the best way to make sure that your message gets through.
For this reason, presentations lend themselves especially well to outlining. In PowerPoint's Normal View, the left side of the screen shows little thumbnail previews of the slides in your presentation. Above these thumbnails is a pair of tabs that enables you to switch between the thumbnails and an outline of your presentation. The Outline tab shows your presentation as an outline. Each slide appears as a separate heading at the highest level of the outline, and the text on each slide appears as lower-level headings subordinate to the slide headings.
To summon the outline, click the Outline tab that is located above the thumbnails. The outline appears, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Presto! Your outline appears.
 | You can expand the area devoted to the outline by clicking and dragging the border of the Outline Pane. |
The following list highlights a few important things to notice about the outline:
- The outline is composed of the titles and body text of each slide. Any other objects that you add to a slide —pictures, charts, and so on — are not included in the outline. Also, if you add any text objects to the slide in addition to the basic title and body text objects that are automatically included when you create a new slide, the additional text objects are not included in the outline.
- Each slide is represented by a high-level heading in the outline. The text of this heading is drawn from the slide's title, and an icon that represents the entire slide appears next to the heading. Also, the slide number appears to the left of the slide icon.
- Each text line from a slide's body text appears as an indented heading. This heading is subordinate to the slide's main title heading.
- An outline can contain subpoints that are subordinate to the main points on each slide. PowerPoint enables you to create as many as five heading levels on each slide, but your slides will get too complicated if you go beyond two headings.
PowerPoint includes a special Outlining toolbar that contains special buttons for working with outlines. This toolbar is not normally displayed, but you can summon it by choosing View --> Toolbars --> Outlining. The Outlining toolbar appears to the left of the outline.
Table 1 summarizes what each button does. Use them in good health!
Table 1: Buttons on the Outlining Toolbar
Name
| What It Does
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Promote
| Promotes the paragraph to a higher outline level
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Demote
| Demotes the paragraph to a lower outline level
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Move Up
| Moves the paragraph up
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Move Down
| Moves the paragraph down
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Collapse
| Collapses the selected slide or slides
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Expand
| Expands the selected slide or slides
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Collapse All
| Collapses an entire presentation
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Expand All
| Expands an entire presentation
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Summary Slide
| Creates a summary slide
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Show Formatting
| Shows or hides text formatting
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