One of the tasks that I find the hardest is to create a new presentation. I have the ideas, but I have to put in the work to make them good. I like to do so with as little distraction as possible, so I start them in Notepad. Not WordPad, not Notepadd ++, but plain old notepad.exe. This allows me to create a simple text outline that can be rearranged as needed, where I can see all of my thoughts and ideas in one spot.

I used to take my Notepad outlines and copy and paste them into PowerPoint. That was time-consuming and error-prone.

Work smarter, not harder. Here’s a trick I learned from Kendra Little on how to take the outline and automatically turn it into a PowerPoint presentation.

Create an outline in Notepad. A couple of tips to help you make the best presentation:

• Each line with a break before and after it will be a new slide.
• To create a slide that has a title, then a list of text, put the title on one line, then enter, then tab. Each tabbed line will represent a bullet point. Tab again to have nested bullet points.

My Notepad outline

Save the file as a .txt file.

Open PowerPoint. Choose the option to open an existing presentation. Navigate to where your text file is saved. In the bottom right, next to File name, use the drop-down menu to select “All Outlines”. Select your outline and click Open.

The PowerPoint presentation will be created. As you can see, each individual, un-indented line is its own slide, and each indented line is a bullet point under the title.

From here, you can add pictures and drawings, apply a theme, and add or remove slides and text.

I find this method incredibly useful for creating presentations!