Import Outlines in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac

Creating outlines for PowerPoint in various external applications lets you stay away from distractions in PowerPoint-land. Once you have the outlines done, it's very easy to import it in the form of slides into PowerPoint. While this import process works the same way in all versions of PowerPoint, there are small interface changes. In this tutorial, we'll show you how to import outlines in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac:

1. Launch PowerPoint (see Figure 1). Note that the program typically starts with an empty slide.
2. 
   Figure 1: PowerPoint 2011
2. Within the Home tab of the Ribbon, click the downward pointing arrow in the New Slide button to bring up the dropdown gallery that you see in Figure 2. Thereafter select Insert Slides from Outline option located at the bottom of the list, as shown in Figure 2.
3. 
   Figure 2: Insert Slides from Outline
3. This will open the Choose a File dialog box that you can see in Figure 3. Navigate to select the outline file on your computer and click on the Insert button. Note that your outline needs to be either a TXT (Text) or RTF (Rich Text Format) file, curiously, Word documents are not supported for importing outlines in PowerPoint for Mac.
4. 
   Figure 3: Choose a File dialog box
4. This will import the outlines into PowerPoint as slides (see Figure 4). Do note that this process only adds slides to an existing presentation, and does not replace any existing slides (you can still see the empty, first slide from Figure 1).
5. 
   Figure 4: PowerPoint presentation after importing slides from outline
5. As shown in Figure 5, all the text from the outline can be seen in the Outline Pane. This same text also shows up in slides as text placeholders (see Text Placeholders vs. Text Boxes).
6. 
   Figure 5: Outline Pane
6. Save the presentation.