With Microsoft's PowerPoint program, you can create professional presentations and enhance them with many features, such as animations, transitions, or design templates. To give your audience an idea of the structure of your presentation from the beginning, create a table of contents . Since the 2007 version, the program no longer includes the option to automatically generate tables of contents in PowerPoint. However, there is another way to do it: we explain how to create it in just a few steps and link it with the corresponding slides..
The more slides your PowerPoint presentation includes, the more we recommend creating a table of contents, as this will help your audience keep the structure of the presentation in mind from the beginning. The best practice is to create the table of contents when all the slides have been designed. In this way, you will avoid having to modify the table more than once. Here's how to create a PowerPoint table of contents by hand step by step.
First, you need to create a new slide , into which the PowerPoint table of contents will be inserted. There are two ways to create a new slide:
Usually, the PowerPoint table of contents follows the title slide , but you can insert it anywhere in the presentation without a problem..
Select the tab? View? from the menu and left-click on the Outline view option . It is a presentation view that, as its name suggests, is especially useful for structuring the content of your slides, since PowerPoint displays a general outline of it in the navigation bar.
In addition to the different presentation views, the menu includes Master views, which help to apply a uniform layout to all the slides in your document..
Right-click in the outline area to open the drop-down menu. There, hover over? Collapse ? and select? Collapse all ?:
This way, PowerPoint will show only the slide titles in the navigation bar . These titles are what will form the table of contents in the next step. To do this, you must first copy the content: mark all the titles and right-click on one of them to open the drop-down menu. Select? Copy? and you will have all the titles that you have marked on the clipboard .
There are keyboard shortcuts that help you copy and paste content much faster. To copy it, press Ctrl + C on your keyboard at the same time. To paste the contents in another place then, press Ctrl + V .
Now you must paste the text that you have copied to the clipboard into the table of contents. To do this, open the? View? Tab again. from the menu and select the presentation view? Normal? . Next, in the navigation bar, left click on the slide that you created in the first step of the tutorial. Then right-click on the slide to open the drop-down menu and select? Paste ?. PowerPoint will insert the text copied to the clipboard into the table of contents.
If you wish, you can modify the content . For example, you may not want all the titles to appear in the table. You can also change the font or color of the text as usual.
If you want, you can number the titles that appear in the PowerPoint table of contents to structure the content even more clearly. To create a numbered list, first select the contents of the slide. Then open the? Home? Tab. from the menu and click the icon to number lists . PowerPoint will number all the points.
PowerPoint, like other very popular programs such as Excel, Word and Outlook, is part of the Microsoft 365 package, which you can purchase at a special price from IONOS.
PowerPoint offers the ability to link each title in the table of contents with the corresponding slides . In this way, when presenting them, you can jump from one section to another with a single click. Follow the steps below to link each of the headings in the PowerPoint table of contents to your slide.
To link the first title of the PowerPoint table of contents to your slide, mark it with the left mouse button. Then right-click to open the drop-down menu and select? Hyperlink ?:
The ? Insert Hyperlink? Dialog box opens . . In the left pane, select the option? Place of this document? and then click the slide that the marked title should link to in the PowerPoint table of contents. Confirm by pressing? OK ?:
If the hyperlink was created successfully, the text is highlighted in blue . If you want, you can change the font color, which will not affect the link; this will continue to be enabled.
