Importing Word doc into PowerPoint

M

Mike Maxwell

I just had a very bad experience importing an MsWord doc into PowerPoint.
The Word doc had headers (i.e. in outline format), as well as a small amount
of text under many of the headings (formatted as 'body'), and some tables.

Only the headings came across--none of the text. So I was reduced to
manually cutting and pasting the text paragraphs into PP.

Even worse were the tables, which I had carefully laid out in Word--I
couldn't even cut and paste them across (the Edit | Paste menu is not
available). I had to reconstruct them from scratch in PP. (Aargh--now that
I am finished, I discovered the trick: you have to choose a slide
"autolayout" that allows you to put in a table. Then do _not_ double click
on the icon that says "double click to add a table", or you'll end up with
all the data of your original table in a single column in one cell of the
table. Instead use Edit | Paste to put it on the page. I'm not sure how to
get rid of that little icon. Maybe some of the other "autolayout"s allow
you to paste in tables?)

I find PP's editing facilities to be cumbersome, and I would much rather use
Word to create a talk, then import it into PP for some final editing. But
this was an exercise in futility. Of course it's possible I was just doing
s.t. wrong, but my point is that it shouldn't be this hard to figure out.

All this was with Office 2000. Is there any improvement with later versions
of Office? And why, Microsoft, are Word and PP such different products?
IMNSHO, a slide presentation should be just a different way of printing
(i.e. formatting) a Word doc. (I know, Microsoft probably isn't listening,
but it helps the soul to rant and rave once in awhile.)

Maybe I'll have a look at Star Office...
 
E

Echo S

The initial issue is with the Word outline.

PPT uses the heading style to determine what text comes through.

Word outline format -->PPT Text
Heading 1 --> Title text
Heading 2 --> Primary bullet
Heading 3 --> Secondary bullet

Etc.

Changing your body text to heading 1/heading 2 in Word should help.

As for Word tables, you should be able to copy/paste them to PPT with no
problems. In fact, I wouldn't recommend using the table autolayout in
PPT to paste Word tables.

Basically, you'd just select the table in Word, move over to PPT and
make sure nothing's selected on the slide, then hit CTRL+V to paste.
Edit/Paste should work, though. The Blaster (I think it was that one)
virus caused people a lot of copy/paste issues--you weren't affected by
that, were you?

You can also try Edit/Paste Special and choose the Word Document Object
option.
 
J

John O

And why, Microsoft, are Word and PP such different products?
IMNSHO, a slide presentation should be just a different way of printing
(i.e. formatting) a Word doc.

Mike,

I feel that PP and Word serve *dramatically* different functions. I was a
presenter long before I knew about PowerPoint, and I strongly disagree about
PP being just a way to print words. If you really fill your slides with so
many words that Word is necessary, I'm concerned about the effectiveness of
your presentations, and the eyelid-weight of your audience. <vbg> Maybe
you've heard the term "PowerPoint Poisoning."

Word is for writing and paper, and it does that extremely well. PowerPoint
is for giving presenters a tool to display complex graphics and ideas on a
large screen to accompany the presentation, and it does that extremely well.

So, don't hold your breath for MS to change anything. :)

John O
 
S

Steve Rindsberg, PPTMVP

I find PP's editing facilities to be cumbersome,

Many people tend to work against the flow in PowerPoint. It's got a lot of
tools that let you just type in text and have it automatically make slides
for you. If you start with a blank slide each time and try to force PPT to
work like Word, you will not be amused. ;-)
And why, Microsoft, are Word and PP such different products?
IMNSHO, a slide presentation should be just a different way of printing
(i.e. formatting) a Word doc.

If that were truly the case, there'd be no real need for PowerPoint. You
could simply use Word and display the results in a Word viewer, Word in
full-screen mode, as HTML, or as a PDF or series of bitmaps in a bitmap
viewer.

And for the type of presentations you do, maybe that *is* the case. Nothing
wrong with that, but if so, it might be best just to stay with Word and look
for an alternate way to present, as above.

For the type of presentations many other people do, Word would be less
efficient than PowerPoint, the results they're after are quite different
from what can be done in Word.

Horses for courses, as they say.
 
M

Mike Maxwell

Echo said:
The initial issue is with the Word outline.
...
Changing your body text to heading 1/heading 2 in Word should help.

Right--except I didn't want it to be bulleted text, I wanted it to be
"plain" text below the bulleted heading. (I'll reply separately to some
other responders, who questioned whether the result would be effective as a
slide.)
As for Word tables, you should be able to copy/paste them to PPT...

Basically, you'd just select the table in Word, move over to PPT and
make sure nothing's selected on the slide, then hit CTRL+V to paste.
Edit/Paste should work, though...
You can also try Edit/Paste Special and choose the Word Document
Object option.

Thanks--I was able to get Paste to at least function just now.
Unfortunately, what PP pastes in if you do this is not the table, but the
contents of the table, one cell to a line. Paste Special actually does give
me the desired result. I should have tried that...but I guess I figured
that if Word knows s.t. is a table (I copied it using Table | Select |
Table), and PowerPoint has tables, then tables ought to copy straight
across, without my having to use Paste Special. Heck, WordPad does it
right! So I didn't think to try Paste Special.

And as I think I mentioned in my original posting, Edit | Paste and Edit |
Paste Special were grayed out. Maybe it was because I hadn't clicked on the
slide. Again, I don't have to click inside a Word doc to paste into it, so
I wasn't expecting the different behavior from PP. I can see know, PP
wouldn't know whether to paste into the title or the lower part of the
slide, but I guess that didn't occur to me then.

Hope this doesn't seem too long-winded and negative. Rather, I'm hoping
that Microsoft is listening. I'm a computer programmer and these things
don't seem obvious. What happens when a naive user tries to turn a Word doc
into a PP presentation?

Mike Maxwell
 
S

Steve Rindsberg, PPTMVP

Hope this doesn't seem too long-winded and negative. Rather, I'm hoping
that Microsoft is listening.

No, you raise some reasonable points, but understand that this group is
basically users talking to users. There's a "Tell Bill" link at the top of
www.pptfaq.com - if you want to forward suggestions to MS, that's a good way
to do it. Don't expect a reply, but be sure that they do listen.
I'm a computer programmer and these things
don't seem obvious. What happens when a naive user tries to turn a Word doc
into a PP presentation?

Most don't.

The functions and goals of the two programs are quite different. I'd no
more expect (or want) PPT to behave like Word than the other way around. Or
like Excel or Outlook. All part of the same box, all serve different
purposes, so all must necessarily behave differently.
 
M

Mike Maxwell

This is a reply to John O and Steve Rindsberg, who separately said more or
less the same thing. (And actually, it's not a reply to them, as they're
not going to change anything they're doing because of this reply--it's more
a msg to the people at Microsoft who design PP.)

John and Steve's comments were replies to my point in my original posting,
where I said:
IMNSHO, a slide presentation should be just a different
way of printing (i.e. formatting) a Word doc

They replied that Word and PP served very different purposes. John put it
thusly:
Word is for writing and paper, and it does that
extremely well. PowerPoint is for giving presenters
a tool to display complex graphics and ideas on a
large screen to accompany the presentation, and
it does that extremely well.

My usage of PP is somewhat different. I prepare a paper (on linguistics or
computational linguistics) for a conference, then later (the night before
the conference :)) make up a set of slides to give an oral version of the
paper. While I can start from scratch, I would prefer to dump the paper
into PP and edit out the excess verbiage, and insert additional bullet
points or slides where necessary

Alternatively, I could edit out a bunch of stuff in Word, then dump the
trimmed version into PP and further edit it. In either case, there's a
typically lot of stuff in my Word doc that I want to save (particularly
examples of words or sentences in some other language, which may be in a
different font and painfully edited to show up right). Of course the bulk
of the text goes > /dev/null, but the point is that I have already created a
bunch of stuff in Word that I don't want to lose, or re-create in PP.

And yes, there is usually lots of text that doesn't wind up as bullet
headings--mostly examples that illustrate the headings. In the case that
prompted my original msg, some of the things I didn't want to lose were
example words (in other languages), or simple paradigms or other chart-like
objects.

Also, I once did some late Sunday night things for a client who wanted to
render Hindi text in a PP slide. The point was not that the audience could
read the Hindi--indeed, it was the exact opposite. So it didn't have to be
legible from the back of the room, say. But Hindi text that showed up OK in
Internet Explorer was marginal in Word (rendering problems for some of the
characters) and pathetic in PowerPoint (almost nothing showed up correctly).
Eventually I solved it by turning the Hindi text in IE into a jpg (via a
round-about process), then pasting it into PP as a picture. This should not
have been necesary, and wouldn't have been if IE, Word and PP all used the
same rendering engine. (I could say s.t. about the way Word and PP read the
keyboard differently, too, but for most people that doesn't matter.)

Sigh, I've ranted enough. Time to do some work :). And thanks for your
comments. I do agree that there are uses for PP that are not like the
things you typically do in Word, but for at least some of us, the two uses
are not that different. So leave PP as a separate program, maybe, but
improve the ability to transfer things between Word and PP. (In the mean
time, maybe I will look into using Word to produce slides in stand-alone
mode. I probably don't need PP's 96 point fonts anyway.)

Mike Maxwell
 
J

John O

Mike, so, it seems that words ARE your presentations. <sheepish grin> And
the people watching you want to see words, so I was a bit ahead of myself on
that point. Sounds like you have some reasonable issues, and I need a beer.
Have a great weekend!

John O
 
E

Echo S

Mike said:
Right--except I didn't want it to be bulleted text, I wanted it to be
"plain" text below the bulleted heading. (I'll reply separately to some
other responders, who questioned whether the result would be effective as a
slide.)

Sure, that makes sense.

You would want to format your master slide in PPT so that there are no
actual bullets on the specific levels you want in the bulleted
placeholder. Do that via View/Master/Slide Master.

Also turn on the Ruler (View/Ruler) and hold down the CTRL button while
dragging the carets on the ruler. That gives you more control and will
allow you to align the text better, even without the bullet symbols in
front of the text.
 
S

Steve Rindsberg, PPTMVP

Alternatively, I could edit out a bunch of stuff in Word, then dump the
trimmed version into PP and further edit it. In either case, there's a
typically lot of stuff in my Word doc that I want to save (particularly
examples of words or sentences in some other language, which may be in a
different font and painfully edited to show up right). Of course the bulk
of the text goes > /dev/null, but the point is that I have already created a
bunch of stuff in Word that I don't want to lose, or re-create in PP.

This certainly makes sense; one thing to consider is using Word's outline
view to organize your paper in the first place (if outlining appeals to you
that is - it works for some of us and is utterly wrongheaded to others).

Once it's in outline format, moving it to PPT is fairly simple.

Top level headlines in the outline become the titles for new slides in PPT.
Second level Word text becomes first level bullets
Third level Word text becomes second level bullet
And so on

As far as multilingual support's concerned, PowerPoint's generally a version
or so behind Word.
It's an ongoing nuisance, but a somewhat understandable one. People buy
Office to get Word and Excel; some of them are pleasantly surprised to find
this PowerPoint thing in the box too. Some never notice it, I suspect. So
when MS allocates resources, PowerPoint always seems to be second or third
in line. Next version, it gets some of the hand-me-downs.
 

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