by Cliff Atkinson, Sociable Media

If you were a Hollywood director who was planning a film, you'd probably hire a storyboard artist to sketch frames of selected scenes from your script. A storyboard is a powerful tool because it lets you see many frames from a story in a single view so that you can consider how those frames relate to one another through a narrative. Without this important perspective, you wouldn't be able to see how the parts link together to become a coherent whole.

You won't need to hire a storyboard artist or sketch anything to create your Microsoft Office PowerPoint storyboard. Instead, you can adapt the basic techniques of storyboarding to help you manage the big picture of your own story and to shift the way you think about a PowerPoint presentation: from individual slides toward slides related as frames in a strip of film.

In Beyond Bullet Points I: Telling a story with your presentation, you learn how to create the Beyond Bullet Points story template, a Microsoft Office Word document that helps you write a script for your presentation. This article shows you how to create a storyboard by sending your story template statements in the Word file to a PowerPoint file.

Setting up a PowerPoint file in this way lets you use the storyboard to plan your words and visuals.

Advantages of the story template

As you fill out your story template, you're also formatting information to fit into a PowerPoint storyboard. The concise statements used in the story template are the same statements that appear in the title area of the PowerPoint slides.

By placing a statement from the story template in the title area of a PowerPoint slide, you establish the meaning of the slide and prepare the way for a visual in the slide area below. Like newspaper headlines, the statement communicates to an audience by using simple, clear, and direct language in a conversational tone.

When you send all of the statements in the story template to a new PowerPoint file, you ensure that you never have to face an empty screen when you begin creating a presentation. Instead you always start with a set of PowerPoint slides, each of which already contains a meaningful headline.

Transfer the story template to PowerPoint

You can send the story template statements in your Word file to a new PowerPoint file by following these steps:

1. Copy the text in your story template document.
2. Create a new Word document by clicking File, and then clicking New.
3. Position the pointer in the new Word document, click Edit, and then click Paste Special.
4. In the Paste Special dialog box, select Unformatted Text, and then click OK.
5. Delete the line containing the title and byline, and also delete the line containing the column headings. Remove any extra spaces between words, and add new line breaks where they're needed so that you end up with only one statement per line.

   

6. Click File, click Send To, and then click Microsoft Office PowerPoint. A new PowerPoint file opens with each statement inserted in the title area of its own slide.

   

7. Click File, and then click Save. Name the new PowerPoint file, and save it to a logical location.

Some of the statements from your story template might not fit perfectly in the title area. You can reposition text, change font styles, change the layout, and add a piece of art to all of your slides by setting up the slide master. Click View, click Master, and then click Slide Master.

Move beyond bullet points

Writing statements for both the story template and the PowerPoint slides allows you to move beyond the conventional PowerPoint approach into a new world of visual storytelling. This process embeds your script in a storyboard and ensures that everything you say and show maps back to the structure and sequence of a story.

More information

For more information about preparing storyboards for PowerPoint presentations, read these related articles by Cliff Atkinson:

• About the Beyond Bullet Points story template
• Use 3 rules to create storyboards
• Plan your spoken words

About the author   Cliff Atkinson, president of Sociable Media, is a leading authority on how to improve communications across organizations. This article is adapted from Beyond Bullet Points: Using Microsoft PowerPoint to Create Presentations That Inform, Motivate, and Inspire, which is available from Microsoft Learning.