I love outlining! I use outlines when planning, brainstorming, writing, and creating presentations. In this article we will explore the benefits of using ChatGPT PowerPoint outlining to speed up and enhance your presentation creation process.
When you start up with a new PowerPoint presentation, you are shown a slide view by default. This lets you create one slide at a time by adding text, images, videos and other elements. While the slide view is useful for creating a slide, I find it easy to get bogged down in choosing images instead of thinking about my presentation structure and flow.
So, instead of starting with the slide view, I always start with the outline view. The outline view lets you work with simple text and bullet points without any images. I find this view helps me focus more fully on my presentation flow without the distraction of trying to come up with images.
So I start by entering each concept on one line, then using tab and shift-tab to indent or unindent points. I can also drag each point to change the order.
So I start by entering each concept on one line, then using tab and shift-tab to indent or unindent points. I can also drag each point to change the order.
This has been my go-to technique for years and PowerPoint’s outline view has worked wonderfully to help me quickly plan my presentations.
But now AI has come into the picture and I started wondering if AI could help with this outlining process.
Microsoft is working on adding AI to it’s Office suite with an AI called Copilot, but I didn’t want to wait for this to be ready. ChatGPT is readily available so I wanted to explore how ChatGPT might be able to help me create my presentation outlines:
Chat GPT PowerPoint Outlining: First Attempts
I decided to test ChatGPT PowerPoint outlining potential by having ChatGPT generate a sample PowerPoint outline.
Here was my question:
Me: Create an outline for a PowerPoint presentation about leadership
And here is ChatGPT’s response:
ChatGPT:
I. IntroductionA. Definition of leadership
B. Importance of leadership in various contexts
C. Purpose of the presentation
II. Qualities of Effective Leaders
A. Vision and goal-setting
B. Communication skills
C. Empathy and emotional intelligence
D. Decision-making and problem-solving
E. Adaptability and resilience
F. Integrity and ethical behavior
III. Leadership Styles
A. Autocratic leadership
B. Democratic leadership
C. Laissez-faire leadership
D. Transformational leadership
E. Servant leadership
IV. Leadership in the Workplace
A. Creating a positive work culture
B. Building and motivating teams
C. Delegating tasks and empowering employees
D. Managing conflicts and fostering collaboration
E. Providing feedback and recognizing achievements
V. Leadership Development
A. Importance of continuous learning and growth
B. Seeking mentorship and coaching
C. Developing self-awareness and emotional intelligence
D. Building effective communication and interpersonal skills
E. Embracing challenges and taking calculated risks
VI. Leadership in Challenging Times
A. Leading through change and uncertainty
B. Inspiring and motivating during crises
C. Navigating diversity and inclusion issues
D. Maintaining resilience and well-being
VII. Examples of Successful Leaders
A. Business leaders
B. Political leaders
C. Social and community leaders
VIII. Conclusion
A. Recap of key points
B. Call to action for developing leadership skills
C. Final thoughts on the importance of leadership
IX. Q&A Session
A. Addressing audience questions and concerns
Wow! An outline like this might have taken me a couple of hours to come up with by doing research online and capturing my own ideas, but ChatGPT PowerPoint outlining took only a few seconds!
I can still go ahead at this point and add my own ideas and concepts, but ChatGPT has provided an excellent base outline to get me going.
ChatGPT PowerPoint Outlining – Inserting into PowerPoint
The next step is to get the outline into PowerPoint. I opened up a new PowerPoint, open the outline view, then copied and paste the Chat GPT results into PowerPoint.
Unfortunately, the paste drops ALL the text into the first slide.
I used to copy and paste the title and points for each slide separately into their respective places on each slide, but that took too long so I went looking for another solution.
I found an article showing how you could create new PowerPoint slides from a Microsoft Word outline.
So I pasted the ChatGPT outline into Word instead and saved the file.
Then from within PowerPoint, I chose the New Slide from Outline option and chose the Word file and it worked perfectly, creating one slide per outline point.
ChatGPT PowerPoint outlining saves me a huge amount of time when creating new presentations for public speaking, workshops, or online presenting such as webinars.
