Tip: Use a Slide Show Instead of an Outline

Some people who write books do it like I do. I keep thinking about the order of things, the structure, even as I write up the draft. This might seem disorganized, but it’s worked for me through a number of books and a lot of years. I adjust continually.

With the book I’m working on now, it’s even worse. My plan-as-you-go book is due early next month so I’m pretty deep into it, as you might imagine. I’m posting part of it on this blog, I’ve done interviews on it (links are on the sidebar), and I do presentations on it. And as I do, it changes. I reshuffle the cards. I can’t help it. I think rewriting and reshuffling is part of the interest in writing.

So today I realized how much I’m using the slide show as card deck as book reshuffler, so much so that I decided to pause briefly to make it a practical tip for you. This can help you with a book, a white paper, a long memo, or whatever. It’s really very simple: a card deck instead of an outline. In my case, much as I’m loving my new iMac, I’m still mainly on Windows with PowerPoint. Here’s the view:

Of course, I realize as I write this that you can’t make much out of that postage-stamp view of a book in process, but what’s happening is that I have almost all of the different segments of the book tied to pictures, which are slides. Each picture you see means a topic to me. A topic is usually like a significant piece of one of the 30 (or so) chapters.

My discussion about the elevator speech, for example. It’s pretty much written, so much so that I posted most of it as a 5-part series here on Planning Startups Stories, but I keep changing where I want to put it in my book. Yesterday it was in the heart of the plan section, where I talk about core strategy of positioning and differentiation. Today I moved it — that’s what prompted this post — down to the “dress it as needed” section, later in the book, where I’m trying to make the point that the plan is a core thing that you can then use to create an elevator speech, a pitch presentation, or a formal plan document, or none of the above, just use it to manage your company.

I doubt I’m the only one who reshuffles content as the book gets closer to completion. Some writers would say that’s crazy, you should set the outline and follow it through until the complete first draft is done. I don’t. If you share that behavior, then you’ll probably like the way this works.

Why this instead of the standard outline? First, because it’s easier, for me anyway. I drag a piece from one place to another using the slide sorter view in PowerPoint. I can drag it back if I want, and I can drag a collection of pieces too, if I want. Second, because I’m working on my presentation at the same time. I’m off to New York tomorrow, and I give a workshop for SCORE in Eugene, Oregon next week, so I will use this presentation and I keep it conceptually linked to the book.

The one thing I miss is the ability to hang slides into an outline view by title, with a hierarchy built in. Aldus Persuasion, which was king of slideshow software before PowerPoint took over,  used to let me indent some slides underneath a section title holder, giving me a visual something like a standard outline, as an alternative to the slide view. PowerPoint’s outline view, however, (the illustration here) keeps them flat, all at the same level, and indenting a group of slides turns them into bullet points. For example, in the outline view at right, I’d like to make slides 14-16 subsets of slide 13 by indenting them. But I can’t. PowerPoint turns them into bullets on slide 13, essentially deleting them (at least it gives me a warning before it does, so I can reconsider).

I miss the combined power of the card deck (called slide sorter view) for some things, and a more powerful outline view for others. If you know a PowerPoint product manager, please send her or him the link to this post. Let’s get that into the software.

I keep thinking maybe Keynote on the iMac will do that, but I haven’t had the time to go explore yet.  My latest iMac is still barely a month old.

In the meantime, this is still so useful that I wanted to share it. And if it’s absurdly obvious, sorry.