What information are stored in a template?
The following settings are stored in each template (a file with a .pot extension):
- Slide size and orientation
- Color Scheme (including color for default fill, line, shadow, text etc.)
- Text Styles (e.g. Title and Body Text placeholder formatting)
- Defaults for text and AutoShapes objects (Fill and Line color and styles, shadows etc.)
- Printer settings for slides, notes, handouts
- Initial View (Slides, Notes Page, Slide Sorter, etc.)
Actually, I am going to take a minute to share with you a problem that happened to my friend Jason in Dublin.
After he had tried out and applied several templates, he decided he did not like them and wanted to go back to his original blank presentation, getting rid of all the changes he had done.
He realized that he couldn't, so he had to use the "Undo" icon and go back a few steps, but he could not reach the point where he had not applied any template yet.
What I suggested him to do, for the future, was: since there's no default "blank" template that you can just apply in case you want to give up using one of the ready-made templates you have already applied, create one by doing the following:
1) Open a blank presentation
2) Go to: File >> Save As...
3) Give a name to this file and call it "Blank"
4) Where it says: "Type of files", on the bottom of the "Save As..." dialog box, select "Presentation template"
5) Be sure to save it in the right folder (in order to find it easily in the future): I suggest to save it in
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Templates\Presentation Designs, so that you can find it together with all the other "official" templates
6) Click "Save" and it's done.
Next time you will apply some templates to test their effect on your slides and you want to go back to a blank template (that is no template at all), all you have to do is click again on the "Apply Design" icon (or click on Format >> Apply Design Template), scroll down the list and select the "Blank.pot" template that you have created before.
In one shot you will get rid of any previously applied template and it will be like you first created it.
Now that you know something more about templates and how they work, it's easy to see how we can modify them to create our personal template.
This is what we need to do, once we have applied the template that we would like to modify:
1) Go to View >> Master >> Slide Master until the Slide Master is displayed
2) From here, make all the possible changes you can do:
- Click on the text boxes, select them and modify the font size, style and color
- Move or increase/decrease the space assigned to the title or the bulleted list
- Change the background color
- Insert your logo, pictures or Clip Art
- Change the color of the elements used to create the design by clicking on them and using the Fill Color icon (on the Drawing toolbar).
Once you have modified your Slide Master, you can go back to the Slide View mode and check the result. In case you notice there's something you still need to change, go back to the Slide Master and do it.
It sounds easy, and actually it is. But there's something more you need to know.
You may realize that once you are in the Slide Master and you try to change some colors to the objects or move something, you might not be able to select anything. You click, and the only thing that gets selected is the entire slide.
What does it mean?
When you see this behavior, it means that the designer who created that template by adding different shapes, lines, rectangles and colors finally decided to "group" together all those elements, so they would have acted as a whole, unique object.
The "grouping" function allows you to join two or more "objects" (lines, shapes, images, text boxes) so they cannot be modified unless you "ungroup" them first.
This option is useful when you want to resize or move a complex object made up by different small elements.
Any time you create a template or a complex image using drawing tools, you are strongly advised to select all of its elements and group them.
To group objects, follow these two easy steps:
a) Select all the objects you want to group (holding down the Shift key when you click)
b) Go to Draw >> Group. It's done.
Back to your template, what you can do to ungroup any template is:
a) Select what can be selected (most of the times the entire slide)
b) Go to Draw >> Ungroup, so all the elements will be separated each other
c) Click first outside the slide to deselect all the objects
d) Select the individual object you want to modify
This way you can take advantage of the professional job that someone else did before you and customize it according to your presentation's needs and your personal taste.
But the way of adding our personal touch to a "standard" and ready-made presentation does not finish here. There's still something we can do by working with Clip Art. Clip Art is made up of those nice and sometimes fancy images you can insert in any presentation to enhance your content, to get the audience's attention or to better "visualize" a topic you are discussing. Let's see how.
You can read this article in the original issue of MasterView.
