If you are heavily invested in Microsoft Office and use it for both personal and professional purposes, chances are you might need to convert your document from one format to another. One of the most common conversions users generally go with is Word document to PowerPoint presentation.

Copy/pasting the content of a document in a presentation is not feasible if the document is lengthy. Also, with the conversion feature embedded right into Microsoft Word, the need to use such outdated concepts negates. The feature to convert uses Artificial Intelligence for the job and is highly effective.

Preparing the Document for Converting into a Presentation

It is fairly easy to convert, given, you are aware of the basic formatting. All you have to do is format the text using the various heading options available in Microsoft Word.

The conversion process will use the Headings in your Word document and create separate slides based on the same into a PowerPoint presentation.

Since we are discussing the basics of the subject, we will only be using ‘Heading 1’ for slide’s Title in the converted presentation and ‘Heading 2’ as the slide content. You can similarly use the other available options in the ‘Style’ section of Word to enhance the clarity and quality of the presentation.

To format the titles, highlight them and then select ‘Heading 1’ from the ‘Styles’ section at the top. Remember, this will be used as the slide title in the PowerPoint presentation after being converted.

For the text under the heading, you can use other heading options. Again, highlight the content under the topic and select ‘Heading 2’. Since this will be nested under the Heading 1 that we previously used, the conversion process will put it as the slide content for the heading.

You can similarly format the rest of the document and make it readable and ready for conversion.

After you format the text, the text color will change to blue, which can be changed later on, using the themes options in Word.

To change the theme, go to the ‘Design’ tab at the top and then select the suitable document formatting from the listed options.

In this case, we have used ‘Basic (Stylish)’ and the text now looks green which is catchy and enhances the visual appeal of a presentation.

Converting Word Document to Presentation

There are two ways you can convert your document to a presentation, either through Microsoft Word or through Microsoft PowerPoint. However, for both methods, you will have to format the text in headings (for slide titles) and sub-headings (for slide content) structure in the document so that it can be converted.

Converting with Microsoft Word

After you have formatted the document, you will need to add the option to convert a document to presentation in the app’s toolbar, if not enabled currently, which will then be added to the top of Microsoft Word.

Click on the ‘File’ menu at the top-left corner to view the various options.

You can now view the information of the current document along with a bunch of features on the left. To enable the conversion icon, select ‘Options’ from the list on the left.

The ‘Word Options’ window will open, select the ‘Quick-Access Toolbar’ tab on the left.

You can now customize the quick access toolbar from this section. Click on the box under ‘Choose commands from’ and select ‘All Commands’ from the drop-down menu.

Next, scroll down and look for ‘Send to Microsoft PowerPoint’ from the list and click on ‘Add’ to enable it. The options are listed in alphabetical order; therefore, it wouldn’t be difficult to locate it. After you have added the feature to Microsoft Word, click on ‘OK’ at the bottom to save the changes and close the window.

Now, to convert the document into a PowerPoint presentation, click on ‘Send to Microsoft PowerPoint’ icon that we just added in the instructions above. You can find it above the ribbon bar in Word.

After you click on ‘Send to Microsoft PowerPoint’ icon, the conversion process will begin. It may take some time depending on the document type and length to convert it. Once the conversion is done, the document will now be in form of a presentation, differentiated by the headings we used earlier.

Converting with Microsoft PowerPoint

The process to convert a Word document to a PowerPoint Presentation is intricate in Microsoft Word, however, it is pretty straightforward and simple in Microsoft PowerPoint.

Open a new presentation on Microsoft PowerPoint and then select the ‘Insert’ tab at the top.

In the ‘Insert’ tab, you will see the option to add various items to the presentation. Since we are here to add a document, click on the ‘New Slide’ icon, the first option from the left. Next, select ‘Slides from Outline’ from the drop-down menu.

The ‘Insert Outline’ window will open where you can locate and select the document which you want to convert. After you have selected the document, click on ‘Insert’ at the bottom to convert and add to Microsoft PowerPoint.

The Word document is now converted to a PowerPoint presentation and the content is distributed between slides by the heading levels that we earlier formatted.

Converting a document to a presentation might have seemed like a herculean task earlier, but it won’t be the case from now on. You can use either of the two methods discussed above for the conversion and save yourself from the hassle of copy/paste. Also, do remember to format the text accurately to attain effective results.