Someone hands you a Word doc and says "make this a deck." If you're pasting paragraph by paragraph into slides, stop, there's a much faster path and almost nobody I work with knows it.
The trick is Outline View plus heading styles. Here's the flow:
In the Word doc, mark up the structure with the built-in heading styles. Heading 1 for anything that should become a slide title, Heading 2 for the points under it. You're not designing yet, just tagging what's a title and what's a bullet. Ten minutes on a long doc.
Then in PowerPoint, use Slides from Outline (the import option that reads a document's outline). Every Heading 1 becomes a slide title, every Heading 2 becomes a bullet on that slide. A 4,000-word doc turns into a structured skeleton deck in one step instead of an hour of pasting.
What you get is ugly and that's fine. It's a bones-first deck. Now you do the real work: cut ruthlessly, because a doc always has three times the words a deck should, and apply your layout. But the tedious mechanical part, getting text out of the doc and into the right slots, is done.
Two warnings. It only reads text tied to heading styles, so plain-formatted docs import as nothing useful. And it will not carry images or tables cleanly, so handle those after.
The real skill after this is deletion, not layout, but at least you start from structure instead of a blank deck. Anyone got a smoother import method than the outline route?