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Importing Text From Other Sources

PowerPoint accepts text from a variety of sources, including some that you might not expect. It deals with that text in different ways, depending on its origin. For example, it handles an Excel worksheet differently than it would handle a plaintext file or a Word table. The following sections look at some of the more popular data sources.

Importing From Other Word Processing Applications

In addition to Word, PowerPoint also imports from plain-text files, WordPerfect (various versions), Microsoft Works, and Rich Text Format (RTF). The procedure is Importing Text from Word" except you change the Files of type setting in the Insert Outline dialog box to match the type of file you are importing from (or choose All Outlines as the file type to see all file formats that can contain outlines). As with the Word import, the better you prepare the file before importing it, the less cleanup there will be to do afterward. You can also open text files from a variety of word-processing applications as new PowerPoint presentations, as described in "Opening a Word Document as a New Presentation" earlier in the chapter.

Some formats import better than others. For example, plain text will not import with any sense of where the breaks between slides should be since there are no heading styles to rely on; you will need to promote certain lines to slide titles in the Outline pane in PowerPoint after the import. However, as I mentioned earlier, you can simulate outline levels in a plain-text file with tab stops, and the tab stops do make the outline levels import correctly from plain text or any other type of file.

Importing From Web Pages

PowerPoint accepts imported text from several Web page formats, including HTML (*l and *) and MHTML (*.mht). It helps if the data is in an orderly outline format, or, if it was originally created from a PowerPoint file, in that there will be less cleanup needed.

There are several ways to import from a Web page:

Open a Web page file as a presentation (File⇨Open).

Insert the text from the Web page as an outline (Insert⇨Slides from Outline).

Insert slides from the Web page (Insert⇨Slides from File), which works best if the Web page is set up as a presentation (for example, if it was originally a PowerPoint presentation but was saved as a Web page at some point).

Here are a few additional tips for importing content from Web pages:

When importing from a Web page, don't expect the content to show up formatted the same way it was on the Web. We're talking strictly about text here. If you want an exact duplicate of the Web page's look, take a "picture" of the page with Shift+PrintScreen and then paste it into PowerPoint (Ctrl+V) as a graphic.

Don't paste HTML text directly into PowerPoint with copy-and-paste, or you may get additional HTML tags you don't want, including tabs that might cause your presentation to try to log onto the Web every time you open it.

If you are importing an outline from an MHT-format Web page that contains pictures, the pictures will be imported into PowerPoint too. If you don't want them, delete them.

If you need to show a live Web page from within PowerPoint, try Shyam Pillai's free Lie Web add-in, at www.mvps.org/skp/liveweb.

Importing From Excel and Other Spreadsheets

In Chapter 6 you will learn how to include spreadsheet data on a PowerPoint slide. That's not what we're talking about here. Rather, here we're talking about a spreadsheet program being used to construct a text-only outline, much like an outline in Word or any other word-processing application. Granted, it's not an ideal tool, but some people do use it for outline building.

An outline in Excel might look something like Figure 4-6. You can import it as an outline with the same Insert⇨Slides from Outline command as for Word. The default file type of All Outlines should catch Excel files as well as Word; if All Outlines is not the current setting, you can either select it or select Microsoft Excel Worksheet.

Figure 4-6: An outline in a spreadsheet application like Excel can be imported into PowerPoint too.

When you open an Excel workbook as a new presentation file, you get a dialog box like the one in Figure 4-7 asking whether you want to use the entire workbook or only certain sheets or certain ranges.

Figure 4-7: Specify which sheet(s) should be imported from a multi-sheet workbook file.

One drawback of importing from a spreadsheet is that there is no way in most spreadsheet programs of distinguishing between outline levels. In Figure 4-6, I had designated the slide titles by making the text bold, but when PowerPoint imports the text, it ignores such indicators. Therefore, each spreadsheet row becomes its own slide, and you must go through the outline in PowerPoint and demote any lines that should be subordinate to the one(s) above.

Another drawback-PowerPoint doesn't recognize named ranges as valid import units. So, for example, if you want to import only the text in a certain named range, there's no good way. You must import either the whole sheet or the whole workbook.