Many people find that they can save a lot
of time by copying text or slides from other programs or from other
PowerPoint presentations to form the basis of a new presentation.
There's no need to reinvent the wheel each time! The following sections
look at various ways to bring in content from external sources.
1. Copying Slides from Other Presentations
There are several ways to copy slides from other presentations. You can:
Open the presentation, save it under a different name, and then delete the slides that you don't want, leaving a new presentation with the desired slides ready for customization.
Open two PowerPoint windows side-by-side and drag-and-drop slides between them.
Open
two PowerPoint presentations, copy slides from one of them to the
Clipboard (Ctrl+C), and then paste them into the other presentation
(Ctrl+V).
Use the Reuse Slides feature in PowerPoint, as described next.
To reuse slides from other presentations with the Reuse Slides feature, follow these steps:
On the Home tab, click the lower portion of the New Slide button to open its menu.
Click Reuse Slides. The Reuse Slides pane appears.
Click Open a PowerPoint File.
OR
Click the Browse button and then click Browse File.
In
the Browse dialog box, select the presentation from which you want to
copy slides, and click Open. Thumbnail images of the slides in the
presentation appear in the Reuse Slides pane, as shown in Figure 1.
(Optional)
If you want to keep the source formatting when copying slides, select
the Keep Source Formatting check box at the bottom of the task pane.
(Optional) To see an enlarged image of one of the slides, move the mouse pointer over it.
Do any of the following:
To insert a single slide, click it.
To insert all slides at once, right-click any slide and choose Insert All Slides.
To
copy only the theme (not the content), right-click any slide and choose
Apply Theme to All Slides, or Apply Theme to Selected Slides.
2. Inserting New Slides from an Outline
All of the Microsoft Office applications work well
together, and so it's easy to move content between them. For example,
you can create an outline for a presentation in Microsoft Word and then
import it into PowerPoint. PowerPoint uses the heading styles that you
assigned in Word to decide which items are slide titles and which items
are slide content. The top-level headings (Heading 1) form the slide
titles.
To try this out, open Word, switch to Outline view
(from the View tab), and then type a short outline of a presentation.
Press Tab to demote, or Shift+Tab to promote, a selected line. Then
save your work, go back to PowerPoint, and follow these steps to import
it:
On the Home tab, click the lower portion of the New Slide button to open its menu.
Click Slides from Outline. The Insert Outline dialog box opens.
Select the file containing the outline text that you want to import.
Click Insert. PowerPoint imports the outline.
If there were already existing slides in the
presentation, they remain untouched. (This includes any blank slides,
and so you might need to delete the blank slide at the beginning of the
presentation after importing.) All of the Heading 1 lines from the
outline become separate slide titles, and all of the subordinate
headings become bullet points in the slides.
2.1. Tips for Better Outline Importing
Although PowerPoint can import any text from any
Word document, you may not always get the results that you want or
expect. For example, you may have a document that consists of a series
of paragraphs with no heading styles applied. When you import this
document into PowerPoint, it might look something like Figure 2.
Figure 2
is a prime example of what happens if you don't prepare a document
before you import it into PowerPoint. PowerPoint makes each paragraph
its own slide and puts all of the text for each one in the title
placeholder. It can't tell which ones are actual headings and which
ones aren't because there are no heading styles in use. The paragraphs
are too long to fit on slides, and so they are truncated off the tops
of the slides. Extra blank lines are interpreted as blank slides. Quite
a train wreck, isn't it? Figure 2
also illustrates an important point to remember: Regular paragraph text
does not work very well in PowerPoint. PowerPoint text is all about
short, snappy bulleted lists and headings. The better that you prepare
the outline before importing it, the less cleanup you will need to do
after importing. Here are some tips:
Non-headings in Word do not import into PowerPoint unless you use no heading styles at all in the document (as in Figure 2). Apply heading styles to the text that you want to import.
Stick with basic styles only in the outline: for example, just Heading 1, Heading 2, and so on.
Delete all blank lines above the first heading. If you don't, you will have blank slides at the beginning of your presentation.
Strip
off as much manual formatting as possible from the Word text, so that
the text picks up its formatting from PowerPoint. To strip off
formatting in Word, select the text and press Ctrl+spacebar.
Do not leave blank lines between paragraphs. These will translate into blank slides or blank bulleted items in PowerPoint.
Delete
any graphic elements, such as clip art, pictures, charts, and so on.
They will not transfer to PowerPoint anyway and may confuse the import
utility.
2.2. Importing from Other Text-Based Formats
In addition to Word, PowerPoint also imports from
plain-text files, from WordPerfect (5.× or 6.×), from Microsoft Works,
and from Web pages. The procedure is the same as in the preceding
steps. If the file does not appear in the Insert Outline dialog box,
change the file type to the desired file type.
If you are setting up a plain-text file for import,
you obviously won't have the outlining tools from Word at your
disposal. Instead, you must rely on tabs. Each line that should be a
title slide should start at the left margin; first-level bullet
paragraphs should be preceded by a single tab; second-level bullets
should be preceded by two tabs, and so on.
2.3. Post-Import Cleanup
After importing text from an outline, there will
probably be a few minor corrections that you need to make. Run through
this checklist:
The first slide in the presentation might be blank. If it is, then delete it.
The
Title Slide layout may not be applied to the first slide; apply that
layout, if necessary. (You can use the Layout list on the Home tab.)
A theme may not be applied; choose one from the Design tab, if necessary, or format your slide masters and layouts as desired.
Some of the text might contain manual
formatting that interferes with the theme formatting and creates
inconsistency. Remove any manual formatting that you notice. (One way
to do this is to select all of the text in the Outline pane by pressing
Ctrl+A and then stripping off the manual formatting by pressing
Ctrl+spacebar or by clicking the Reset button in the Slides group on
the Home tab.)
If some of the text is
too long to fit comfortably on a slide, change to a different slide
layout, such as a two-column list, if necessary. You might also need to
split the content into two or more slides.
There
might be some blank bullet points on some slides (if you missed
deleting all of the extra paragraph breaks before importing). Delete
these bullet points.
3. Opening a Word Document as a New Presentation
Instead of importing slides from a Word document or
other text-based document, as described in the preceding section, you
can simply open the Word document in PowerPoint. PowerPoint starts a
new presentation file to hold the imported text. This saves some time
if you are starting a new presentation anyway, and you don't have any
existing slides to merge with the incoming content.
To open a Word document in PowerPoint, follow these steps:
Choose File 
Open. The Open dialog box appears.
Change the file type to All Outlines.
Click Open. The document outline becomes a PowerPoint presentation, with all Heading 1 paragraphs becoming title slides.
NOTE
You can't open or insert a Word outline in
PowerPoint if it is currently open in Word. This limitation is an issue
only for Word files, not plain text or other formats.
4. Importing Text from Web Pages
PowerPoint accepts imported text from several
Web-page formats, including HTML and MHTML (Single File Web Page). It
is helpful if the data is in an orderly outline format, or if it was
originally created from a PowerPoint file, because there will be less
cleanup needed.
There are several ways to import from a Web page:
Open a Web-page file as you would an outline (see the preceding section), but set the file type to All Web Pages.
Insert the text from the Web page as you would a Word outline (in the Home tab, click New Slide Slides from Outline).
Reuse slides from a Web presentation as you would from any other presentation (in the Home tab, click New Slide Reuse Slides).
NOTE
You should use one of the above methods rather
than pasting HTML text directly into PowerPoint. This is because when
you paste HTML text, you might get additional HTML tags that you don't
want, including cross-references that might cause your presentation to
try to log onto a Web server every time you open it.
When importing from a Web page, don't expect the
content to appear formatted the same way that it was on the Web page.
We're talking strictly about text import here. The formatting on the
Web page comes from HTML tags or from a style sheet, neither of which
you can import. If you want an exact duplicate of the Web page's
appearance, take a picture of the page with the Shift+PrintScreen
command, and then paste it into PowerPoint (Ctrl+V) as a graphic.
If you are importing an outline from an MHTML-format
Web page that contains pictures, the pictures are also imported into
PowerPoint. If importing from a regular HTML file, you cannot import
the pictures.
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If you need to show a live Web page from within PowerPoint, try Shyam Pillai's free Live Web add-in, found at www.mvps.org/skp/liveweb.htm. |
