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How to create a summary slide on PowerPoint

Posted by admin on June 1, 2008 in tocs

On my previous post, what’s in a word? I explain how my poor choosing of keywords for PowerTOC has caused less users reaching our site than would have been possible. On this post, I will show how to use the built in "summary slide" button to create a Summary slide of selected slides of your presentation. Then I will show why PowerTOC is a better solution.

Using the built in "summary slide" button

To create a slide containing the titles selected, or all, slides of your presentation, proceed as follows:

1. Open your presentation and change to the slide sorter view.
2. Select the slides you want to include using Ctrl+Click. To select all slides, press Ctrl+A or Edit > Select all.
3. Click on the Summary slide button on the Slide Sorter toolbar. If the Slide Sorter toolbar is hidden, on the View menu, click Toolbars, and then click on Slide Sorter.

The summary slide is created and placed right before the first slide selected on step 2.

As you can see, it is not difficult, but the built in method just described has some important limitations that are solved with PowerTOC.

Benefits of PowerTOC over the built in summary slide command

1. The summary slide function was removed on PowerPoint 2007. Please look at the explanation on the Microsoft Office site: What happened to the Summary Slide and table of contents options?
2. As you may have noticed, the procedure described above is static. If you make changes to your presentation, the Summary Slide will not be modified and you will have to delete the previous Summary Slide and create a new one from scratch.
3. The Summary Slide thus created gets the general formatting of the normal slide layout. If you want to customize the formatting for the Summary Slide you will lose all changes made if you have to re-create the Summary Slide.
4. The Summary Slide will not include links to the slides, nor the slide numbers.
5. If your presentation is long and you want to include all slides, you will have to manually split the Summary Slide on two or more slides.
6. On PowerPoint versions prior to 2007, you won’t be able to layout the Summary Slide in two columns.

For all these reasons, if you want to create a Table of Contents of your presentation, as opposed to just a Summary Slide, you need an specialized add-in like PowerTOC to do the task.