Using Microsoft Pow­er­Point, you can design and create pro­fes­sion­al pre­sen­ta­tions with numerous features, such as an­i­ma­tions, tran­si­tions, and design templates. It is rec­om­mend­ed that you create a table of contents to give your audience an overview of your pre­sen­ta­tion at the very beginning. However, as of Pow­er­Point 2007, Microsoft removed the feature that au­to­mat­i­cal­ly generated a table of contents in Pow­er­Point. We will show you how to create a table of contents in Pow­er­Point in just a few steps and how to link to in­di­vid­ual slides.

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Creating a table of contents in Pow­er­Point: step-by-step in­struc­tions

The more slides you have, the more useful it is to create a table of contents for your Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tion. This will provide your audience with an overview of your pre­sen­ta­tion at the start. You should wait to create the table of contents until after you have finished your pre­sen­ta­tion. This will help you avoid having to modify your table of contents re­peat­ed­ly. In the following, we will provide you with step-by-step in­struc­tions on how to manually create a table of contents in Pow­er­Point.

Step 1: Creating the slide for the table of contents

First, you need to create a new slide where you will add the Pow­er­Point table of contents in the following steps. There are two ways to create a new slide:

  • Via the menu: Select the “Home” tab in the menu and click on “New Slide”. Pow­er­Point will then insert a new slide which you can drag to the desired position in the slide pane.
  • Via the slide pane: Right-click in the slide pane and select “New Slide” from the pop-up menu. Pow­er­Point will then insert a slide at the cor­re­spond­ing position.

Usually, the Pow­er­Point table of contents will come right after the title page. However, you can choose to insert it anywhere in your pre­sen­ta­tion.

Image: PowerPoint: creating a new slide for a table of contents
Create a new slide where you will then be able to insert your Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tion’s table of contents.

Step 2: Copying the outline for the table of contents

Select the “View” tab located in the menu. Then, left-click on “Outline View”. As the name suggests, this provides you with an overview of the pre­sen­ta­tion which is par­tic­u­lar­ly useful for struc­tur­ing the content. Pow­er­Point will then display an overview of the slide contents in the slide pane.

Tip

In addition to the Pre­sen­ta­tion Views, you will also find the Master Views in this menu bar. Using these, you can set up a uniform design for your pre­sen­ta­tion.

Image: PowerPoint table of contents: Outline View
Switch to Outline View by going to “View” and then “Outline View”.

Open the pop-up menu by right-clicking on the outline structure. From this drop-down menu, select “Collapse” and then “Collapse All”.

Image: Creating a PowerPoint table of contents: collapsing the outline structure
Via the pop-up menu, collapse the outline structure for all the slides.

Pow­er­Point will then only display the slide headings in the slide pane. The outline structure will show the bullet points which you will copy to your table of contents in the next step. To do so, first copy the content. Select all the slide titles and right-click to open the pop-up menu. Then, select “Copy”. This will copy all the selected headings to the clipboard.

Tip

You can copy content even faster by using a keyboard shortcut. To do so, press the keys [Ctrl] + [C] on your keyboard at the same time. To paste the content elsewhere later, press the keys [Ctrl] + [V] at the same time.

Image: Creating a PowerPoint table of contents: copying the outline structure
Copy the outline structure to the clipboard so that you can place it in the Pow­er­Point table of contents in the next step.

Step 3: Inserting entries into the Pow­er­Point table of contents

In this step, you will paste the copied outline structure from the clipboard into your table of contents. To do this, switch back to the “Normal” pre­sen­ta­tion view which can be found in the menu under the “View” tab. Then, select the slide that you created for the table of contents in step 1 by left-clicking on it in the slide pane. Open the pop-up menu by right-clicking on the text box and select “Paste”. Pow­er­Point will then paste the outline structure from the clipboard into your table of contents.

If you wish, you can modify the content. For example, you can do so if you do not want to display all the slide headings for your pre­sen­ta­tion in the table of contents. You can also change the text font and color as usual.

Image: PowerPoint: inserting a table of contents
Paste the outline structure into the slide that you created for the Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tion table of contents in step 1.

Step 4: Numbering the outline structure

If you wish, you can design your Pow­er­Point table of contents to be clearer by numbering the outline structure. To create a numbered list, first select the contents of the slide. Then, select the “Home” tab from the menu and click on the icon for numbered lists. Pow­er­Point will then replace the bullet points with the cor­re­spond­ing numbering.

Image: PowerPoint: numbering a table of contents
Number the outline structure of your Pow­er­Point table of contents to make the list clearer.

Linking the table of contents to slides

Pow­er­Point lets you link the outline of your table of contents directly to the cor­re­spond­ing slides. This allows you to jump directly to a specific section of your pre­sen­ta­tion with a single click. To create links in your Pow­er­Point table of contents, follow the steps below for each bullet point.

Step 1: Selecting the content

To link the first bullet point in your Pow­er­Point table of contents, left-click to select it. Then, right-click to open the pop-up menu and select “Link”.

Image: Linking a PowerPoint table of contents: creating links
Select the first bullet point and select “Link” from the pop-up menu.

Step 2: Linking the content to the slides

The “Insert Hyperlink” dialog box will open. On the left-hand side, click on “Place in This Document”. Then, choose the slide that you want the selected bullet point in your Pow­er­Point table of contents to link to. Confirm your selection by clicking “OK”.

Image: Linking a PowerPoint table of contents: “Insert Hyperlink” dialog box
The selected content or bullet point in your Pow­er­Point table of contents will link to the selected slide.

Step 3: Modifying the text color

You can recognize a suc­cess­ful­ly created link by its blue text color. If you wish, you can change this text color as you normally would. This will not remove the link. It will remain active.

Image: Linking a PowerPoint table of contents: standard hyperlink
If you wish, you can modify the text font and color of any hy­per­links as you normally would.
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