Powerpoint Templates

You should use Powerpoint Templates because they are very powerful.  

In this blogpost you can learn:

1. Why you should use Powerpoint Templates
2. What Powerpoint Templates are and how you can use them and
3. How to create your own Powerpoint Template
4. Using your custom Powerpoint Template

Why you should use Powerpoint Templates.

We use Powerpoint templates because they save us a lot of time and energy. Using Powerpoint, you already use a template by default.

Before starting to build your presentation, take some time to select an appropriate presentation template. That will save you even more time and you will end up with a better result.

• Good Powerpoint templates tackle 2 problems:

1. they give you a good and consistent design 
2. they provide a structure for your presentation

• The possible drawbacks of using templates are:

1. the selected template may not comply with your company's presentation standards, like color scheme and logo
2. the structure of the template is not be what you are looking for

Good and consistent designs

With fonts, different sections, a color scheme and presets for single or multiple columns. 

You probably experienced yourself how tedious it is to update a presentation in which you created each slide 100% manually, selecting fonts, font sizes and colors. After a few changes, you will find that your slides are not more exactly synchronized when you skip from one slide to the other, due to all kind of subtle shifting of text boxes and images.

Presentation structure

Say, you need to create a sales presentation for a new customer. Your purpose is to present your company and where it stands for and to explain your service offering.

A template that contains a set of slides that correspond to your needs will save you time and might even give you some valuable ideas to improve the content and the layout of your presentation.

Non-compliance with the requirements of your company

The company colors and the company logo must be added to a template. This can be time consuming. But if you do it the correct way and you create your own template from this customized presentation, then you have to do the work only once. 

The structure is not what you are looking for 

In this case, you have to change the structure of the presentation, and if it is really not what you need, then you might even need to change slides or to remove slides and to create new ones yourself. 

Of course, this is not the purpose of a template. So if the structure is no good, you better choose another template and go with that one.

What Powerpoint templates are and how you can use them

Many presenters use Powerpoint templates to have a good starting point for creating a new presentation.

A template it a set of standardized Powerpoint slides from which you can build a presentation.

Microsoft powerpoint provides thousands of free templates to choose from. 

It looks like this:

(to access this page in Powerpoint: Menu: File -> New

The Powerpoint templates are categorized. For example: Business templates:

When you click for example on the Coffee Shop template, Powerpoint opens this presentation for you with all the predefined slides in it. In my 2016 version of Powerpoint, the Coffee Shop presentation contains 15 slides.

In front, you see the first slide. In the left pane, you can see thumbnails of the first 7 slides in the presentation.

Now you can start customizing your Coffee Shop presentation.

But the real template is a set of hidden slides that you can use to add a new slide to your presentation.

You can see the template slides from the Menu: Home -> New Slide:

There are 4 template slide (3 white and 1 black). These slides have been designed for the presentation.

Below is a screen shot of the slide that will be created when you select the second template slide:

Another aspect of your presentation design is the Theme. The Theme specifies the colors and the fonts used in the presentation. 

By choosing another Theme, you change your entire presentation in 1 click. In the Menu: Design - choose the Theme you want. When you hoover over a Theme, you already see the effect on the active slide.

Summarizing, the Powerpoint template is a set of pre-defined slides that serve as a basis for the creation of a new slide. The Theme is a predifined color and font formatting scheme that you can apply to a presentation with 1 click.

How to Create Your Own Powerpoint Template

Steps:

1) Create a blank presentation: Menu: File -> New -> Blank presentation

2) Open the Slide Master: Menu: View-> Slide Master

You will see this screen:

The slide master is the top slide in the list in the left pane. 

Here is a screen shot of the ribbon to change the Slide Masters:

3) Make changes to the Slide Master and to the related template slides, if you need to:

• Select a Theme from the Theme galery
• Change the background style
• Remove the background
• Rename a slide
• Insert or remove the master slide
• Insert or remove a related template slide
• Remove or add placeholders
• Select a different color scheme
• Select a different font for each text block and indention level
• Change the slide size (4:3, 16:9 or custom to change the orientation)

Changes you make to the Slide Master will also change the common parts in the related template slides. 

4) Save As Powerpoint template (*.potx)

Menu: File ->  Save As -> Browse -> <enter filename> and 

       Save As Type:  Powerpoint template (*.potx)

The template will be saved in the Custom Office Templates folder. Default, this folder exists or will be created in the Documents folder of the user.

Using Your Custom Powerpoint Template

Using the template you have created through the steps above is easy.

Choose from the Menu: File -> New  and click on "Personal" or "Custom" to display your custom template.

 Click on the template you created. A new presentation based on your custom template will be opened and you can start adding content.