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 21-18.

FIGURE 21-18
A Word document consisting mainly of plain paragraphs makes for an unattractive presentation.

Figure 21-18 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. 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 21-18 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 21-18). 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.

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