How to Create a Roadmap in PowerPoint?

PowerPoint has way more potential than just creating simple and attractive slides. Teams use PowerPoint presentations to prepare and plan tasks for an entire project.

Roadmaps can be used to visualize the possible timelines and milestones of your project. How to create a roadmap in PowerPoint? What’s the easiest way to make a timeline or roadmap in PPT slides?

Using templates for roadmaps is a good idea, but you can also manually make a roadmap in PowerPoint from scratch. You just need to have a clear understanding of the timelines so that turning those ideas into visually appealing slides becomes easier for you.

What is a Roadmap in PowerPoint?

The visualization of steps, milestones, and timelines in a process is called a roadmap. The idea of roadmaps in PowerPoint is similar to this approach, and there are pre-designed graphics and visuals that you can use for making a timeline or roadmap.

A high-level roadmap may only present 4-6 stages of the process and only gives a broader idea of the project to the audience. A detailed roadmap may have several stages to showcase the detailed steps to achieve the milestones. When you are sharing the idea with the team members, detailed roadmaps are usually preferred.

How to Make a Roadmap in PowerPoint?

You need a roadmap for the audience so they can get an idea of what a process would look like. Roadmaps also act as trackers so that you can measure progress at any stage. So, we will learn how to create a roadmap in PowerPoint for the visual presentation of a process in a few stages or levels.

Step 1: Insert SmartArt in PowerPoint

Open your PowerPoint presentation slide, go to the Insert tab, and click the SmartArt button from the Illustrations section.

A new pop-up will appear with different options. Go to Process and then select any timeline or illustration that you like. Click OK to insert that SmartArt into your slide.

Step 2: Edit Roadmap

A basic roadmap will appear on the screen that we can edit and customize with project details. First, let’s enter text for each stage of the roadmap. When you enter text, PowerPoint automatically adjusts the text size to fit inside the tiles.

Now, we have created the basic roadmap, but we need many other changes to the roadmap to make it more detailed and appealing. Let’s see what else changes we can make here.

Add More Stages or Shapes to Roadmap

We have three tiles or steps in the process, but we need more steps. You can easily add a shape to the roadmap.

Select the shape after which you want to add a shape, and in the SmartArt Design tab, click the Add Shape button and choose whether to add a shape after or before the selected shape.

Add or Edit Text for the Roadmap

You don’t need to directly write text on the shapes. It might be hard for you to edit text. There is a dedicated text editor for the roadmap.

Click the Arrow at the start of the roadmap, and a small text editor will appear. Text for each slide is represented by a bullet point. Pressing Enter will automatically add a new shape to the timeline.

You can directly edit, delete, or add text for the timeline here.

Go to any bullet point, and when you press Enter, PowerPoint will automatically add a shape after that selected shape. You can easily edit text and add or remove shapes from this editor.

How to Make a Roadmap Colorful?

The roadmap shown in the example is pretty basic and boring. If you want to make it more colorful, you don’t need to change the color of every shape. PowerPoint has an easy way to make your roadmap more colorful and appealing.

Select the roadmap, go to SmartArt Design, and then click Change Colors. You have several color templates that you can choose for a consistent display for all slides.

You can try different color options to see which color scheme suits your presentation the most. In the Format tab, right next to the SmartArt Design tab, you can change other elements of the timeline.

How to Create a Roadmap from a Template?

PowerPoint has some templates that can be used to make roadmaps easily. Editing a template is an easier and faster way to make presentations. Follow these steps to create a roadmap from a template in PowerPoint.

Step 1: Start New Presentation

Open PowerPoint >> Start New presentation and search for “Roadmap” in the template section.

Step 2: Select a Roadmap Template

PowerPoint will display some roadmap templates that you can edit according to your project. Select any template that you like and click “Create.”

Step 3: Edit Roadmap

Roadmap will open in PowerPoint, and you can edit and customize the roadmap from here. These templates usually offer more stages and detailed levels to showcase in-depth milestones of a project.

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Conclusion

Creating a roadmap with a template is easy, but Twistly offers an even better, one-click solution for timelines and other visuals for presentations. PowerPoint is a complex tool that most users don’t fully understand. With Twistly, we have integrated AI in PowerPoint so that every beginner and pro user can fully benefit from ChatGPT for PowerPoint.