Create an Outline in Microsoft Word of the text you would later like to convert to a PowerPoint presentation.

Type the slide headings followed by the list of items that will be bulleted points on separate lines.

Convert Word styles to black and white by going to the Home Ribbon, Styles, select Change Styles, Style Set, and Default (Black and White).

When you first install Word 2007, the Heading styles are set to be in blue text. This will remain the text colour on the PowerPoint slides, regardless of whether you apply a design theme at a later time. To change this select the first item on the outline list that is intended to be a slide title.

Click on the Heading 1 style and continue to apply the Heading 1 style to all items in the outline list that will be slide titles.

Select the item(s) that will be bullet points under the first heading and apply the Heading 2 style to these items.

Continue to add the Heading 2 style to the rest of the items in the list that will be bullet points on the PowerPoint slide.

If you do not have access to Microsoft Word, then as an alternative you can use any text editor you have access to. However you may be limited to the styles you can use.

As the world has not completely converted to 2007 save the Word document with a file extension of .DOC rather than the default file extension of .DOCX (PowerPoint 2007), the outline file can be opened in any version of Word or PowerPoint at a later time.

Open the Outline in PowerPoint by going to the Office button and navigating to the folder where you saved your Word outline file.

In the Files of type section of the dialog box, click the drop down list and choose All Outlines (*txt, *.rtf, *.doc, *.wpd, *.wps, *.docx, *.docm). Open the Word document.

By opening the Word outline in PowerPoint, it has transformed into a series of slides using your outline data as slide titles and bulleted content.

To finish apply a Design to your PowerPoint Presentation.

This process also works in reverse. Once you have created a PowerPoint presentation, you can convert it to a Word document.

By Kelly Foxhall