When designing a presentation, it's almost always a bad idea to fill a slide with lots of text. People will read the text faster than you can say it and you'll lose their attention. Besides, how interesting will your presentation be if people know what you are going to say right before you say it.

A better approach is to distill large text blocks down into outlines or bulleted lists.

Because we selected a slide with a bulleted list using the autolayout tool in the previous step, all we need to do is add text to the outline area.

Each time we hit the enter key, we will get a new bulleted entry in out list. We'll enter all of the items and then we'll tweak the format in a minute.

The first thing we will change is to indent some of the items in the list under the main headings.

The right and left arrow buttons will move the text to new levels in the outline hierarchy. Each time we click the right arrow we will move an additional layer down the hierarchy. Clicking the left arrow will move the item up the hierarchy.

We'll select and move some of the items one level down in the hierarchy and we're finished with the slide.

Although this particular slide is finished, let’s take a look at the other options we have when it comes to building bulleted or numbered lists. Use the up and down arrows to move the text up or down relative to the other text items in the outline.

You'll notice that the outline text has bullets by default. If you want to remove bullets from an outline item, click the item, then click the bullet toggle button on the toolbar. Click the button again to attach bullets to a paragraph the previously had no bullets.

Finally, we can click the numbering and bullets button to customize the layout of the bullets.

The tabs across the top of the screen let us choose whatever type of bullets or numbering we like.

Some tabs let us select bullets, numbering types, or graphical bullet styles.

Other tabs let us customize spacing and position of the bullets or even use our own graphics as bullet symbols.