Create a PowerPoint presentation from a plain text file

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Suppose you need to start working on a presentation and [gasp!] don't have a copy of PowerPoint handy. Or that you've put together a bunch of outline notes and want to convert them quickly into a presentation.

No problem.

Open Notepad and start typing or copy and paste your text into Notepad. You'll want to format your text like so:

This is a slide heading
<tab>This is a top level text bullet
<tab><tab>This is a second level text bullet
This is another slide heading

In other words:

• No tabs for a heading
• One tab for a first level bullet point
• Two tabs for a second level bullet point
• and so on

Save the text file.

Now start PowerPoint and choose File, Open. In the File, Open dialog box, choose "All Outlines (*.txt, etc.) from the Files of Type listbox, then doubleclick the file you just saved from Notepad.

PowerPoint loads the text file and converts it into bulleted text slides.

Apply the template of your choice, format to taste and serve warm.

Note that you can also choose Insert, Slides, From File and pick a text file like this to insert new slides into an existing presentation.

If you prefer to work in Word, you can put Heading styles and outline features to good use. See PowerPoint Presentations from Word Outlines by Geetesh Bajaj for the full story.

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