Adding a table of contents or an agenda to your PowerPoint presentation is essential for providing your audience with a clear structure of your presentation. An agenda slide or table of contents slide should provide an easy to read overview of your presentation as well as provide tracking of your current position in the presentation.This can be done automatically if you have Ampler for PowerPoint, but it can also be done manually by following the steps below.
Creating a table of contents in PowerPoint is easy. Basically you create a slide with a list of all the topics in your presentation, then copy this overview to the head of each section. Finally you update the tracker on each slide to correctly show the current section:
Often times when working on a presentation, the name of the topics or sections change over time. In these cases you need to update all the table of contents slides with the new names. Luckily this is easily achieved with clever use of the feature ‘Replace‘:
Changing the order of topics in your PowerPoint presentations can be quite challenging. Not only must all table of contents slides be updated with the new order, the trackers must also be updated on each slide. The best way is to move the section, update the table of contents slides, and manually update all the trackers:
Slide numbers for each topic in the table of contents is a usefull to show the length of each section as well as provide an easy way to navigate the document. However, I strongly recommend not to add slide numbers before the whole deck is final, as to minimize the risk of having to update the page numbers. Add the slide numbers, as you would add any new column to the table of contents slides:
Sharing is caring as they say. To avoid having to design your own PowerPoint agenda slides, here you can download some free templates for a table of contents slides for PowerPoint:
Table of Contents free templates for PowerPoint
Clearly PowerPoint needs to have an automated way to create, maintain, and update table of contents slides in your presentations. For this, and many other reasons, we have created Ampler for PowerPoint, which contains a large number of custom tools to make your life easier when working in PowerPoint. Like the tool ‘Agenda’ to quickly create a professional table of contents slide that updates automatically. If you would like to check it out, you can download a free trial here:
