Outlining Your Presentation

Stay with me on this one. It’s long, but important. If I had a single piece of advice to give to someone about to create a presentation, it would be… 

OUTLINE YOUR PRESENTATION

And yet, the vast majority of presentations I design for others skip the one step that will make their writers’ job a controlled process as opposed to random chaos. 

Like the vast majority of the world, you probably sit down to create your story and immediately dive into using PowerPoint or Keynote writing headers, bullet points and blocks of text. You probably also quickly start trying to format text and find images on Google that support the idea that just came into your head. Why?

1. It seems easier
2. You think you don’t have time to put off writing “the meat”
3. The software all but begs you to start writing your headers and bullet points.

The problem with rejecting the use of an outline is that you end up forever trying to get a sense of the big picture, get mired in details, miss major components and ultimately find yourself having to identify your story structure near the end from the pieces in front of you. 

I am often asked for “a template so I can start writing my content.” I always respond that I would prefer to design content and not just a frame around it. I hope that Stephen King doesn’t need a designed book jacket to start outlining and writing a novel. 

One reason why outlining is crucial is that most presentations undergo heavy editing from colleagues and superiors. That’s just life. But I have designed countless 1st drafts that, when shown to the boss, ended up completely rewritten because the focus was wrong or the big picture was missed. A solid 1-page outline might save countless wasted hours on your next presentation. So, how do you outline? 

 

OUTLINING BY HAND

But if you prefer outlining by hand, consider using sticky notes (any size that works for you) and a wall or large table to compose your overall story. I admit that I rarely find that this method fits me personally, but Duarte Design, the country’s leading presentation firm, swears by sticky notes and advocates for them passionately. (Note that there are also software versions of sticky notes if you prefer the keyboard like I do.)

OUTLINING WITH MICROSOFT WORD OR ANOTHER TEXT EDITOR 

Way before you start thinking about slides, fonts, colors and imagery, you should be thinking about content. And Microsoft Word—for all it’s endless faults—is a very serviceable word processor to lay down and organize your ideas. If you choose to make this a detailed prose outline, more power to you. There will be time later to edit 3 paragraphs of text into a slide that says only “Poor customer service has reduced customer base by 25%.” 

Or, you can keep your Word outline more traditional—just like you did in high school when you wrote term papers: hierarchical lists and numbered lists. For this style, use a small font, reduce your margins, and resist long sentences so you can see your entire outline on 1-2 pages. 

In either case, if you spend an extra few minutes setting up your Word outline, you will be able to convert your document into PowerPoint slides with the click of a button. To do this, you’ll need to use paragraph styles in Word. You can use the default styles that Word gives you or you can modify them or create your own. What’s important is that you apply a “Heading 1” style to every line that you want to be a new slide header. “Heading 2” should be applied to any text that you want to be a 1st level bullet point. “Header 3” and so on, should be used for subsequent level bullets.

After you’ve applied headers, you have 2 methods for moving into PowerPoint…

Method #1: “Send to Microsoft Office PowerPoint”

This is a handy little one-touch tool that you will never find in any of the Office ribbons. To use this, you need to add it to your quick access toolbar by going to the Windows circular button (top left), selecting “Word Options” and then “Customize.” From the pulldown menu at the top, select “All Commands” and scroll down until you find “Send to Microsoft Office PowerPoint.” “Add” this to your custom toolbar and you’ll be good to go. Now, once your Word doc is properly set up, just click the newly added icon and a PowerPoint file will be automatically created from your text outline—as many slides as you have indicated.

Method #2: Open “All Outlines…” from PowerPoint
From within PowerPoint Cntrl-O or “Open” from the Office Button. Under “Files of Type,” select “All Outlines.” This will allow you to open and convert your styled Word doc into PPT slides. You can also open a few other types of text files, although your conversion mileage may vary depending on how they were set up.

With either method, this is what you’ll get. Obviously, you’ll have more work to do in applying a template and designing your information, but if your outline passed the tests in Word, you should now be able to think about visualizing your message as opposed to creating it.

OUTLINING WITH POWERPOINT

Unless you’re simply going to use your first couple slides as a word processor (not a bad idea…) I strongly recommend doing your outlining away from PowerPoint to avoid the temptation to make slides while you write. But if you must…take a look at at the left side of your screen at your slide thumbnails. At the top there is a tab for “Outline view” which will display the hierarchical text from your slide headers and bulleted copy. The cool thing about outline view is that you can type your headers and bullets on slides or directly in the thumbnail outline pane. Either way, PPT creates new slides for you. You can also reorder your slides directly in the outline pane, or you can switch to slide sorter to get a birds’ eye view and do the same. If you do use outline preview, you should pull the pane out to the right as far as it will go, reducing the actual slide on the pasteboard to a thumbnail. You should be focusing on the outline here, not the slide itself. 

OUTLINING WITH EXCEL (My Favorite*)

All of my writing—even the plays and screenplays I have written—tend to be very modular in style. And perhaps as a result, I find that Excel is actually most effective for me as an outlining tool. I’m not a numbers guy, but for some reason I’m pretty good at using a spreadsheet to lay out my topics and ideas. I find Excel to be great at re-ordering sections, creating hierarchies, making notes, hiding and unhiding text, sorting and color coding. Furthermore, if I use small enough text (and a large enough monitor), Excel allows me to see my entire project on a single page. I can get an immediate visual sense of my story in one glance. 

FINAL THOUGHTS

I’ve designed, created and seen thousands of presentations from children’s school reports to major CEO addresses and $100 million dollar business pitches. I even did some work for a certain financial institution when they had to explain themselves to the public after they might have contributed to a certain recent financial meltdown. And without fail, the one factor that all “successful” presentations have shared in common, was planning, organization and a controlling story. Design can only help communicate your story better. It can’t help if you don’t know what your story is.

A strong well-written outline is the surest way, in my opinion, to achieve a successful presentation and tell an effective story.

*I also want to note that I recently discovered an amazing Mac-only app called Scrivener that I’m currently using to outline and write a fiction piece. For organizing any type of research or creative writing project, I’ve never seen anything as robust and useful.