Powerpoint ?: Need to Convert a Long Text to One-Word-Per-Slide

Factual Questions
1

Hello, Straightdoper Powerpoint Experts; AMAPAC here with a task that exceeds my powerpoint-fu.

What I want to do is convert a long text in .doc format into a powerpoint show so that I end up with one word per slide.

The idea is to have my students (8th-grade reading) practice very fast decoding of the language as the first step toward improved reading comprehension. I plan to do this by timing the slides so that they go about 120 words per minute or so, one word at a time, not so fast that they can’t do it, but fast enough that it’s challenging for them.

Here’s my labor-intensive method for doing it right now: what I do is make myself a powerpoint show (in MS Powerpoint 2003; I can’t stand the 2007 version, none of the tools is where I expect them to be!), I set the background and whatnot, then I cut-and-paste the first paragraph of the text I want to work with into the slide.

I get the text the size and position I want, center the paragraph, then I duplicate that slide to make as many copies of it as there are words in the paragraph. I go the first slide and highlight and delete everything except the first word; I go to the next slide and highlight and delete everything except the second word, and so on. The process ends up with one word, centered, on each slide, so that the students’ eye does not have to move at all as the material is presented and read.

This is proving to be too much to deal with for anything other than very short articles–and I plan to do it for much longer works, if I can.

Thank you for any hints you can provide…AMAPAC.

2

I’ve used Powerpoint only a very little bit, and don’t have it on this computer so I can’t check, but here’s what I’d try. Open the document in Word. Choosing the page setup to be centered vertically (File, page setup, layout, vertical alignment) . Format the text so each line is centered horizontally (highlight all the text and choose format paragraph alignment centered). Do a global replace replacing [space] with [manual page break]* Save the file then retrieve it into Powerpoint or copy and paste it into Powerpoint if you can open it directly.

I don’t know if this last step will preserve the formatting

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3

OldGuy: Brilliant! I can see how that might do it, using the manual page break function in word first, before the transfer. I’ll give it a try…one moment…AMAPAC.

4

OldGuy: Ah-ha! Worked great, with a little bit of tweaking. You are a million-dollar man, you have just saved me dozens of hours of work, and I am very grateful. If I can do anything for you, please contact me through this site. Thank you very much…AMAPAC.