The Analyst's Path

PowerPoint Outline view

The Outline view shows one thing only: text that lives in a title placeholder or a content placeholder. Text you typed into a floating text box isn't there. Text inside a chart, a table, a picture or a SmartArt graphic isn't there. That single restriction turns the Outline into the most reliable audit available of how a deck was actually built, because it separates the text a machine can read from the text a machine can't.

3 min readPart of PowerPoint Ground-Up: Interface, Navigation, Sections and File CraftOpen in course mode

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The Outline view shows one thing only: text that lives in a title placeholder or a content placeholder. Text you typed into a floating text box isn't there. Text inside a chart, a table, a picture or a SmartArt graphic isn't there. That single restriction turns the Outline into the most reliable audit available of how a deck was actually built, because it separates the text a machine can read from the text a machine can't.

How does Outline view audit how a deck was built?

Try the audit on the 34-slide update. Twenty-six slides have their title in the title placeholder, so 76.47% of the deck shows a title in the Outline and 8 slides show nothing where a title should be. Nineteen slides have their body text in a content placeholder, so 55.88% of the bodies reach the Outline and 15 don't. Every one of those gaps is a floating text box that somebody dragged onto a slide because it was faster at the time. It usually was faster too. That's what makes the habit so hard to break.

And the cost of that shortcut has nothing to do with looks. Text outside a placeholder doesn't appear in the Outline and doesn't print on an outline handout. Assistive technology announces it in creation order rather than in the order a reader would take it, unless you fix that order by hand. It doesn't inherit the master's typography, so it drifts on the next theme change, and it doesn't move when a layout changes. One floating text box is a nuisance.

Fifteen of them is a deck nobody can restructure without opening every slide.

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How do you use Outline view to check the storyline?

Next, the Outline gives you the read-only-the-titles test. It's brutal, in a useful way. Collapse the Outline to titles alone and read them in order. If the titles make an argument, the deck has a storyline. If they read as a list of topics, the deck is an index. In the audit deck, 4 of the 34 titles are full sentences with a verb, which is 11.76% of all slides and 15.38% of the titles the Outline can see. The other 22 visible titles are labels. That ratio is the fastest measurement you have of whether a deck will land, and it takes ninety seconds.

Don't use the Outline as a typing surface, though. You can type an entire deck there, and the decks produced that way are recognisable at a glance: every slide is a title with three or four bullets, because that is the only structure the Outline can express. Use it to read and to reorder, then build the actual slide in Normal view where a chart, a diagram or a single sentence can be the whole content.

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Part of the course

This page is part of PowerPoint Ground-Up: Interface, Navigation, Sections and File Craft (PR0.02), in Phase 0: Orientation and foundations. The module's flashcards and its quiz are in the app.