If you have a document typed in Microsoft Word and want to do a presentation based on that document, you don’t have to retype everything into PowerPoint or cut and paste between the two programs. You can simply export your Word document to PowerPoint.

Well, it’s not always quite that “simple.” You’ll probably need to do some prep work on that Word document to get the best results. Before you perform the conversion, open the Word document and use the File -> Save As command to create a copy of the document under another name. This way, you won’t screw up the original document.

Now, go through your Word document and convert it into an outline. To do this, you apply Heading styles to all the paragraphs you want included in your presentation. Why? Because Office is going to use those headings to create the slides:

• Paragraphs with the Heading 1 style will become slide titles.
• Paragraphs with the Heading 2 style will become bullet lists.
• Paragraphs with the Heading 3 style will become sub-bullet lists.

Watch out: If you just take a typical Word document with lots of lengthy paragraphs and convert it into a PowerPoint presentation, you’ll end up with a huge mess of a presentation. The conversion may either ignore the paragraphs that do not use the Heading styles or try to shove huge amounts of text on each slide. You can try it, but you’ll probably be disappointed. Transform the document into an outline first and it works much better.

Tip: Change to Outline view in Word to get a better feel for how your slides will appear in PowerPoint. To change to Outline View, click View -> Outline.

Once your Word document is in pretty good shape, the conversion itself is quick and easy:

1. Open the Word document that you want to convert into a PowerPoint presentation.
2. Click File -> Send To -> Microsoft Office PowerPoint.

Viola! You now have an instant presentation that you can style to your heart’s content; add graphics, charts, and other objects; and animate with special effects and transitions.