PowerPoint Template Masterclass - Part One - Template Setup

is your powerpoint presentation file misbehaving maybe the images and the content are not lining up that annoying background is always in the way and the page number and footers have a mind of their own now it doesn't matter if you're using a default template from powerpoint you bought a commercial template or you paid someone to create a custom template for you that pesky file is still not working as intended and i'm about to show you why in this master class you're going to learn how to be a powerpoint template master you'll learn how to set up new templates turn existing presentations into a proper template and diagnose and fix misbehaving files because if you're having issues with your template chances are it was not set up properly but the good news is that powerpoint is the universal file format for presentations which means if you set up your template correctly you can import it into keynote for those who are using a mac or into google slides and your file will still work powerpoint is also the only presentation tool that allows you to import scalable vector graphics also known as svg and edit them directly on your slides and that's why in my opinion powerpoint still rules them all so if you invest some time here with me today and learn how powerpoint templates works it's going to make your life so much easier next time you start working on a presentation so are you ready let's get started and work on your next template so let's start with part one template setup now if you understand the structure of templates and how to set up a new template from scratch it's going to make it so much easier for you to convert future file into templates to merge files to apply styles to particular files and also to diagnose and fix misbehaving files so that's why in part one we're starting with the template setup more specifically you're going to learn about the difference between themes and templates how to work with the master slide setup how to create default settings how to create custom slide layouts based on use case and how to import graphics and create custom image placeholders so let's start with the difference between a theme and templates themes are files that have an extension of thmx and they come as a default from powerpoint they're usually a combination of fonts colors and backgrounds a template is a file that ends with p-o-t-x and it's usually a theme but it also has a sample content that could be sample slides that are used on a regular basis it could also have a style guide so let me show you what i mean so here i am in a client's folder and you can see here i've created three different files for them one is thmx which is a theme now if you look at the preview you're going to notice that it's just showing me a bunch of boxes so there's really no content in this box if i click on the potx which is a template there is some content in that file and if i click on the pptx which is the regular files from from powerpoint this file also has some content so let's see what the difference is between all three so that when you're working on files whether it's for yourself your for your teams and departments or for client projects you can identify what type of form file format you can share with them so i'm going to start with the theme i'm going to double click on this file and let's just open it now once you take a look at this file you're going to notice that there's really no content in this file but what that file does contain is it contains some pre-existing layouts that i created as part of that theme so if i go into view master slide master where the usual templates are you can see that this file has some customization to it it's got some section breaks it's got some image placeholders and some slanted areas so you can see that what that's what the theme looks like now this is a blank file so let me just show you what the theme of this blank file would be if i look at it you're going to see that there's really nothing here so if i'm trying to check what theme this file is i can go into view because every file in powerpoint has a theme connected to it and that's how you would diagnose it you would be in the file itself and you would go into design and you're going to click here under themes now you're going to notice if i hover on this presentation it says that this presentation is using the office theme which makes sense because that's a starting file from powerpoint so it's that's when you start the default file that's where the this theme is now office this also microsoft does give you some pre-existing themes that you can pick from but personally i don't like to use them because there are millions of people in the world who use powerpoint and chances are they're going to be picking one of these so i don't want my presentations or any of the presentations for my clients to look like something that millions of people use around the world so that's why when we i'm creating files i start usually with the theme so the theme is kind of helps me set the the font i set the colors i set the image placeholders and then when i'm done when i have all these customizations for my clients what i end up doing is i go back to the normal so this file is in place it's got their logo and everything now i can go into design and if i click on themes i have the option to save current theme and i can give it a new name now in this particular case this theme is already saved i've already saved it because i already showed you how i opened this file now notice when i hover on this presentation at the top notice what it says it says newcastle because that's the file that i gave it and if i click on the custom right now newcastle is the only one because that's the only one i have left in my themes folder so now you can see the difference of the pre-made that come with powerpoint these other themes and that's how powerpoint works so if you understand how themes work it'll help you build better templates as well now let me show you the file format again and now let's go into a powerpoint into a template so i want to show you the common uh denominator between the two files and what's different so this one is a potx which is the powerpoint file format for a template so if i open it now you can see here i've opened it this file has some content in it because i wanted to give the client their brand style guide so i wanted to show them what their colors are how they can use the logo and some section breaks so that they can take this file and test it so usually what i do is i give them a template and i say test it over a week or two see does this fill all your company needs and then we start creating some common slides that they might need for their organization so this file is still in progress so you can see here we still don't have a lot of content in place because it's still in testing but i have the image placeholders and i'm trying to think how do i create a theme that fits their use case on a daily basis now what's common between the two files now if you notice this was the theme and this was the template is that powerpoint did not give them the same name i opened the file now if you look at the file here i had specifically said newcastle template and this was newcastle group theme so why did powerpoint do that because powerpoint is trying to prevent me or someone else to overwrite the file because this is a theme we don't want to overwrite it unless we go into design save as theme and that's how you maintain the integrity of a brand in the organization because if you give your client a standard template like this one here in powerpoint and now i open this file notice what happens it has some content in it but now anyone in the organization can go and start working on this file messing up the layout messing up the design they might even go into view a slide master start changing the fonts and the colors and then if they say save let me just go back to normal i'm waiting for powerpoint to there you go you see the file name it kept the name so now if they go file save powerpoint is going to let them overwrite the design and we don't want that so now you know the difference between the standard powerpoint files the themes and the templates now templates the way you would save them is now you know how to save a theme as i showed you before you would go into the theme save current theme so how do you save a template now if you saved a file and it has some designs in it and some content that you want your organization to use on a regular basis usually for example sales presentations could be templates as well you would just go into file save as and then you can see here the different options so by default powerpoint is going to say presentation pptx if you want to save it as a template you'll have to pick potx now there are old file formats you can notice that before it used to be p o t that's the old one but most people are now on the new format so make sure it's a p o t x and the same thing with presentations some people still save as the ppt which is the old file format if anyone has a the software from before 2003 i doubt many people do but maybe there are but usually just go with the default pptx template potx or if you're saving a theme you'll have to go into the design and save it right from here now when you save a current theme i just wanted to show you where the file ends up because many people save it and then they say well where is that file how can i give it to my clients so let me show you where that file forward blur is now you can do a search online and go to microsoft and google to try to find the location of your folder because what's going to happen is that location of the folder is going to be different based on the operating system you're using the computer whether you're using a mac or a pc the version of the operating system let's say windows and what version of a mac you're using and also the version of the software so there's so many variables and it's so hard to find that folder and that's why this question always comes up so my best tip for you is if you don't know where it is is to just go into the design and just save anything save you'll notice here i already have one but in your case it's going to be blank the custom so just click on save current theme and you'll notice this is the folder so just go in here and give it a name testing so i'm doing that because in your case this is going to be empty whereas in my case i already have a file in here i can search for but in your case if that's new just call it testing or whatever you want give it the name that you're looking for and now when you save it this is going to go into your themes folder so now you can just go open the folder for example in this case this is the presentation folder that i want to share with my client and i want to look for that theme so i'm just going to search for it and you'll notice right away it shows up because that's the only file on my computer with that name now if i look at the bottom i can see the path and you can see why it's complex to find specifically on a mac because it's a hidden folder it's kind of hidden in some of these numbered folders that's very hard to find so i'm going to click on it here and now i've located i can see my testing theme here and now i can either duplicate it copy it and share it with my client or copy it and put it in their folder so i hope this makes your life easier because that question does comes up a lot for me on where's that folder now in my case i like to keep my themes folder clean once i've finished on a client project i remove it for my from my themes folder so that i can keep it clean and just send the files over to the client however i do keep the colors in the fonts and we will be talking about that in the next segment so now you know the difference between themes and templates and when to use them so really the common denominator is that both themes and templates have similar functionalities and that's why people sometimes use them interchangeably for example they both help you with brand consistency as you saw we cannot overwrite the files so once you create that themes and colors and content every time you open that file you have to save it under a new name so that's how you keep your brand consistency they also help save time because then that way you can apply quick styles if you have placeholders fonts and the colors in place it saves time with the formatting and it also as i just said with formatting it makes it easier because most people don't know how to put the image on the slide and how to make it look good but if you've got these image placeholders and the content placeholders in place then you'll get that consistency and it'll be easy for people to format slides and save time so now next we're going to start with the master slide setup we're going to learn how to build a strong template foundation for brand management and business scalability now to build a strong foundation we need to know how does powerpoint work with themes and templates so i've just started a brand new file so all i did was file new presentation and you'll notice that by default powerpoint has given me a standard office theme which has that blank white layout and some of these uh pre-existing slide layouts the two columns some of the standard content but apart from that there's not much going on in here so to customize it i'm going to have to go into view master slide master and this is where i get to now control some of the colors the fonts and the layouts now a common mistake that a lot of people do and i do myself is i used to come in here and start deleting items now i highly recommend you don't delete any of the elements on the first slide the first slide is the master layout and if you click here on the master layout you'll notice that there's these five elements it's the title and you've also got the content page number footer etc now these five elements control the rest of the theme for you so if you start deleting elements on the first slide you're going to create some conflicts let me show you what i mean so for example here we've got the the footer and the date now i used to make that mistake i used to come in here and thinking well okay i'm going to remove clutter i'm going to remove the date because i don't need it even though that date impacts the rest of the slides so i used to come in here delete it now notice what happens i've immediately created a different font here from the from the footer than from the date that was here before that's because now powerpoint has realized that there's a disconnection between what's happening on this slide and on this slide now this might seem like a simple error but it might create future errors when you're merging presentations or when you're reapplying themes so that's why you need to keep keep these main elements in place so that way you can click and re-apply and apply themes to different presentations so if i click on here now you'll notice i've created a little bug a little bug that we used to work before so example in powerpoint i can click on height footer show footer you can see now when i say it's show footer that date is gone but if i try to hide it again look what happened i've already jammed that file i've created a conflict that now will create future problems for me and so in the you know if you start experiencing some buggy files and themes that are not working well chances are someone has deleted some of these main core items so that's why i really can't stress enough just keep these five elements in place and then move them around to where you think they would fit because this slide is not really used that much this is more to control the rest of the slides so for example when you're on the normal view and you click here you try to click one of these layouts you're not picking the first slide you're just picking the subsequent slides so that's why don't delete anything from here just keep them where they are and then we'll start formatting them in the next section now the next caveat i wanted to say on building a strong foundation is you'll notice that powerpoint by default has given us some pre-existing structures so if i right click on this slide and say rename you're going to notice that powerpoint has given it a title slide because powerpoint is always looking where is that powerpoint slide so if you start deleting these now and and creating new ones with different names you're also going to create some conflict for yourself so i recommend keep the standard these are the standard 10 slides including the last two they might seem odd i used to delete them because they've got that vertical text but in some languages that could be needed and now that you know that sometimes you can apply and reapply themes powerpoint is going to be looking for these slides to match them so every time you click here on the theme let's just go back in place and you switch themes powerpoint is going to look you can see here now i've clicked on that one because i've got the two two column theme and i can just go click here again and then click on the first one which would be the title so let's go back into the master slide and see what powerpoint has done you'll notice that the first slide still has the five elements we do need them and then you can start creating subsequent slides and if i right click you'll notice that powerpoint is still calling this a title slide and if i go to the body we'll notice that the vertical ones are in place now if we had deleted some of the old ones and now we try to reapply themes that's where some of the conflict could occur so i hope you understand now why we need to keep the five main elements in place and why we need to keep these subsequent slides in place now in the next segment we're going to start working on customizing this first slide we're going to pick our fonts our colors and once we do that we'll start working on some of the customizations of the layouts keeping the main content in place and also creating some additional slides that will make our life easier so let's start with the default font settings how to choose the right font family and font size for your presentation so to set our default font settings we have to be once again into the slide master so now we're going to be doing that on the first slide with the first five components that i talked to you about now if i click on one of them you'll notice that by default powerpoint is giving them a heading so you'll notice that the top title is a heading and if i click on anything else on the slide powerpoint is identifying them as a body look at that here at the body that's because the theme right now is showing the headings and body now a common mistake that i used to make as well and i see many of the files people do is they click on the title and they say well i don't like that default that just came with powerpoint or whatever theme maybe i want to click and pick this font so it looks something a little bit fancy but now look what ends up happening if i click on it you'll notice that powerpoint does not recognize that this is a heading anymore so anytime you try to update the theme and merge files that have other themes that's where some of the conflicts will occur so to avoid these conflicts we're going to have to change the default settings from the theme itself not from the first slide so we're going to click here on slide master and we're going to click on the drop down here under fonts and pick a new font theme now you'll notice that just like the other themes with the colors powerpoint is giving us a starting point and the starting point is usually your default font on your computer so whether you're on a pc or a mac right now microsoft uses the calibri as the starting point so for your template you can just keep it as is or you can go pick one of these safe fonts now the reason i call them save fonts is because these starting points are common fonts that are available on most people's computers so if i pick something that's available on most people's computer then anyone can go open that file and that font will still look somehow consistent but if i pick a custom font kind of like what i created here for for one of my client project bebas and that font is not available on most people's computer so while on my computer it looks fine you can see here that powerpoint is recognizing that this is the heading and this is the body that might create an issue for some people that's because there's something called safe fonts and something called custom fonts so say fonts i created this here just to show you the difference are fonts that are available on everyone's computer and you they are safe because no matter who you share the file with the file will look the the same but if you start using some of the free custom fonts like what i'm using here right now for example my computer is using my template uses the rubik font from google and most people don't have that so what you have to do is you have to go to google download the font put it on your computer and then that font will appear consistent especially if you want to share it as a theme you don't want to use the embed theme the powerpoint does have an embed theme up font option but it might not work on all computers so that's why i highly recommend that you tell your clients if you're giving them a custom font you let them know that we're using a free custom font or whether you buy a premium font like there are thousands of fonts that you can buy that look really fancy and you can install them on your system and then customize the font but before we do that i wanted to show you the caveat about the save fonts for example look at this safe font file that i created here you'll notice that this one is using the heading kind of my template the rubik and then i created the second slide for example if this is manual formatting or even set in the template this font looks really fancy it looks nice on my computer but what happens if i share this file with someone that does not have it so for example this file right now is saved on my onedrive if you are a member with microsoft onedrive you'll have access to that drive and you can save files on it and the advantage is that if you do that you can click on the share here button if you notice it on powerpoint that's of course only available to people who have that membership so i'm going to click share and i'm going to copy link so i'm going to copy it and i'm going to say let me just show you how it happens if i click on copy it's going to ask me do you want to share it as view only or view with edit i'm going to say edit so for example if you're collaborating on the file with someone else i'm going to click edit so now you see it it did copy it to my clipboard and now i'm going to go open a new web browser so i'm going to go into my safari put that link and i'm going to click enter and see what happens now now i'm opening powerpoint for the web browser so the first slide looks okay that's because it's using the the rubik font which is similar to calibri even though powerpoint did you know make some adjustment that adjustment is not visible but now notice the second font i'm going to click here on the second slide you'll see that powerpoint is not displaying it properly even though my second slide looks fancy on my desktop that's because i have the font but someone that does not have the font on their computer it's just going to look basic so nothing really much happens here so this is where you get to decide how do you want to work with it with your files who are you sharing with with if you're just working on it yourself kind of like myself i work with myself or my close team that know my fonts then i can use some custom fonts and i can make sure that my team also has that on their on their computer but if you're sharing it with a client or if you're going to a conference and they say give us your file we're going to put it on our computer and that computer does not have your font then you're going to mess up your whole design so i wanted to bring up that caveat before i walk you through how to create the custom font now something else is available on a pc that's not available on the mac so for example i'm going to go back here now to my presentation let me just show you the the the custom presentation if i go in here and i click on the fonts you're going to notice that at the top i have some of my custom fonts that i created for example my rubik font that i created for my brand if i click on it you're going to notice that right away the presentation has updated the heading and the body to the rubik font so now i can go and make that bold and customize the color but that option to customize is only available on a pc it's not available on the mac so i put it on a slide so i can show you what it might look like because i do know that a lot of people now do use a a mac let me just get that presentation here again so i'm going to go open that here and this is what it really looks like so if you're on a pc once you click on that drop down at the button at the bottom there's going to be something that says customize now i cannot show it to you because i don't have that on my computer but when you click that customize option you're going to end up with this drop down box that or a pop-up box that lets you choose your heading font and your body font and once you save that you can give it a name and click save and now it'll get saved into that themes folder remember how i showed you that themes folder so let's go back in here and i'm going to search for my rubric because i do have one here rubik rubik.xml so now i go back and i notice i'm back in the themes folder so if you notice under the theme folders that's where your custom fonts get saved so you can create as many custom fonts as you like families so i do that i've got my rubik one here and anytime i create one for my clients so that's why i keep them because on a mac sometimes i might want to reuse them for example lato is another google font that i like i might want to use it for another theme so i start creating some of my custom themes quicksand is also another uh google font roboto they're all free fonts that and i want to probably reuse them so i've saved them and i've keep them here in my theme fonts and when i do i'll be able to go back to that presentation so let me just go back to that presentation we were working on here and then i'll be able to click and choose them for example as just like i showed you i picked the rubric i can go and click the later you can see here right away now my presentation is customizing to some of these custom it says at the top custom and at the bottom office so what happens if you're on a mac and you don't have that option so on a mac that step is a little bit more complex because you're going to have to go open that xml file and make some changes so let me show you i'm here in the theme fonts i'm going to go open one of them so for example i'm going to go open the rubric right click that's where you will need an xml editor usually usually it's an html file so if you cannot do that yourself you can probably ask someone who knows how to we usually do that for our clients or you can just find someone and and tell them to make a quick change it's actually just a few words you'll just open one of the files let me just show you i'm going to open it with adobe dreamweaver here right now so once you open that xml file it's going to look something like this it's a simple code that lets microsoft know what is the scheme of your font and what do you want to use for a major font so the major font that would be the heading and what you want to use for a minor font that would be the body now you can put whatever font you like in this particular case that's my rubric font that i'm using for my template so for example if i wanted to change it to something else i would have to click here and let's say lato lato is another uh font that's available for oops why is it that zero let me just pick here lato and let's say i want the body as well to be later that's a common google font now in some cases you can put later bold but i tried that and i found that it could create some conflict so i'd recommend you don't you can just leave it as later here later here and then i we're going to call that top one as well later so these are the really three options you would change you just put that and now we can save that file so i'm going to go save as now i already have that later family on on my theme you can see here i already have it so i'm just going to call it something else i'm going to call it lato testing so that you can see how it shows up on my powerpoint so i'm going to call it lato testing save so now i can go back into that starter presentation and if i click on the fonts i'm going to notice that later testing you see it here that's the one i just saved so if i click on it it's changed the font to lato now what if i wanted that to be bold and if you recall i mentioned not to add that on the xml that's where you can do that customization here so it's okay to pick bold italic here but it's not okay to change the font family from the top so i don't want to be doing this and bold and italic that's not going to work i need to be picking always the heading for the top and then i can do some customization i can change the color i can give it whatever other formatting i want but the main thing we need to highlight is that major and minor if you remember the heading and the body so that is saved from here now if you are on a pc or lucky because you can do that right away from that pop-up but if you're on a mac like myself then you do need to do some extra customization so now you know how to pick a safe font or how to work with some of the customized fonts and you also know how to customize them on a pc on a mac but there's one thing else i wanted to talk about and that's the default font size so if you're creating a template like i'm working with right now for an online course it's okay to use some of the default font sizing for example if you go into the standard presentation you're going to notice that powerpoint usually starts with 44 at the top and 28 at the body that's great if you're working for an online presentation but if you're working and you're creating a presentation that's going to be shown in a bigger meeting room where there could be some people all the way back sitting in the back then i would recommend you up the title font and the body font to something between 44 and 60 and also if you're working at a large auditorium for example some of the conferences could have thousands of people in that room you don't want to be using small thoughts that's where you would set the template and you would want to make it bigger so that's another thing that you could set right here when you're working on the first slide you can if you wanted to or you can do that on the substance subsequent slides because as you recall that first slide does not appear for you on the front end this really just dictates the basics so for example if you wanted to create a title with a much bigger font that's where you can start customizing them one at a time so congratulations now you know more about fonts and how to help yourself your teams and your clients regardless if they're working on a pc or on a mac now our next step is to start working on the default color palette so we're going to learn how to choose and add the right default color combination to your template now working with colors works a lot like fonts if you remember with fonts we talked about how you need to change the theme and you need to avoid manual formatting because if i click here and pick a manual font it's going to break from the theme and it's the same with the colors when you start a presentation template many people make that mistake where they go on the starting slide they pick on the first font and then they go in here and they start picking their own color they avoid the theme now you notice the theme is the top we've got this is the theme colors that are part of the presentation they might look at them and they say you know what i don't want any of these colors i want to use pink that's my template and so they pick that and they think that now they've updated the template but that's going to create some conflicts because that pink is not really part of the theme so if i click here on the slide master and i click on the colors and let's say i change my mind and i want to use the green if i click on it you'll notice that that pink is not changing because powerpoint is not recognizing it as being part of the theme so if i wanted to make that pink then i need to not change it from here manually i need to go and customize that theme so i'm going to go back in here and make that black again and i'm going to go into slide master i'm going to click customize and now i would click on here and change some of these colors if i wanted it to be pink instead of green i would click on here and locate the pink and change it and if i do that you'll notice that this color has changed so now before i change the colors and save it and give it a name i need to understand the hierarchy how does powerpoint deal with these names and why is there at the top does it say text and background and at the bottom it says accent and it says hyperlink so how does this work to explain that i created the slide for you let me show you the hierarchy so that you can pick your colors strategically so by default the first four are text and it says dark text background you'll see a dark light dark light so the way it works is powerpoint makes the first one as white and black and these colors control the primary text so anytime you create the first text usually powerpoint is going to go and pick one of these two colors now powerpoint gives us an option let's say you don't want the black you want an alternate dark background in my case it's the navy i can change it so i've created an alternate rather than black and white i created navy and white i can make it navy and light gray navy a light blue there's many things i can do with the second one but let me show you now what happens in some of the features and that will help you decide how to pick these colors now the first thing you need to know is that that white and black affect the text they also affect the text on charts so for example i have here a chart that i created i i created a brand new slide and i said slide new and then i picked a chart and i created a chart so notice what ends up happening is by default powerpoint has the labels in that gray if i click on it and i go to the color notice that powerpoint is going to the black and it's picking that second gray color now i don't know why but by default that's what powerpoint does so if i change this color and i make it yellow or pink then what's going to happen my charts are also going to become yellow and pink with a secondary color so it's going to create a little bit more work if i have a lot of charts to work for so that's why i always recommend keep the first two as black and white unless you really have to change them the second ones as well i recommend you you pick your color strategically mainly because that color is also affecting the background so let me show you in this template how that would work and how powerpoint works with background so if i go into the slide master of this particular file you're going to notice that i have some slides that are white and some slides that are dark so the way you would work with this for example if i have the light and i click on the text notice that powerpoint is picking now this navy well what if i want to create an alternate version of this light but i want it to be dark and i wanted white text on dark and sometimes i do like to do that for example notice what i've done here with the section breaks i like that you might have recognized the slide i've used it before on my presentation i also have it in a white format so let's say i want to make this one into a dark format so i'm going to duplicate it and powerpoint gives me an easy option i can click here on slide master i can click on background and if i pick the navy which is part of my template notice what happens everything now updated my text became white and the background became navy all i have to do right now is just change the footer because you notice the footer it was picking up the darker color so i can just go to the footer in here now and rather than picking some i could probably pick a lighter gray and it will work and now i have a darker version of this slide so i can click rename it and rather than number one i can keep it as title and content which is what powerpoint uses and i'll just call it dark and rename so this is an option of why when you're working with that template the color palette you need to keep that in mind another option people use maybe they might not like some of my clients as well maybe they don't want the dark and light in one template what i usually do is i create a light version and then i click here and duplicate and on the same file i might create a dark version for them so for example i can go in here dark and notice how they most of them have updated automatically of course i might have to do some minor tweaks but now i have a light and dark version and the way that i would access that is from the front end so for example if i'm here you'll notice i've got the light template and i have the dark one now this seems a lot and i don't want that specifically for my file but i just wanted to show you how that controls your color so i'm going to go back into my slide here and i'm going to delete the dark one now a second thing that you want to keep in mind when you're working with colors is that the accent colors the ones that follow impact what happens on the charts as well and your diagrams anytime you're creating some of the smart smart artwork or some of the chart by default when you start powerpoint is going to start coloring things in order for example if you look here at the preview you'll notice that powerpoint is picking one the light blue the darker blue and the navy as well so now you see why i have my navy twice why would i have navy here and i would have navy a second time in the accent that's because i want that by default when i start a chart i want powerpoint to show these colors and i want navy to be part of them and so if i did not include it in the accent then it would not be showing up on my chart it might be some other color so that's why in my case my palette has that navy twice and i have that white twice so now when you go back to work on your presentation let me get back to that first one which is the blank one you get to customize that color to fit your own brand so if you have a brand color for example if we go to this presentation here that i did for my previous client you'll notice that on the brand style guide i gave them various colors the panton is if they're going to a commercial press usually you would want to do your logo or any embroidery with a specific panton if you're designing for the screen usually an rgb color would be working rgb stands for red green and blue so usually it's a sequence of three numbers or i would recommend you use the hex color which is a web safe color so in this case i'm going to pick the hex color and i'm going to copy it so for let's say we're customizing this for them i would click on the color customize i would choose my background colors and let's say you click on the accent you would put that hex color here and now i know that if i click away i've got that burgundy from the brand and now i get to pick the subsequent colors so that's how you do it one by one you pick your backgrounds your accent colors now something else i wanted to mention about the hyperlink you'll notice that there's the hyperlink in green and the hyperlink followed in the different colors i personally like to keep all my hyperlink blues for my templates and for my clients because universally hyperlinks are known as blue but it also depends on the brand and the application and how your client or yourself plan to use the file and if you don't want it to show a different color for the hyperlink i usually like to keep them the same so i would click on the picker and and now what happens is the hyperlink and the followed are the same colors so that's how you'd customize it now you'd give it a name let me just call it testing so you can see how that would work if i call it testing and save now we're going to go back to that theme folder if you remember that theme folder so if you want to share that theme with your client you can just click here on the theme colors and if i scroll down on the custom i'm going to find the testing here somewhere there it is i've got the testing now i don't have to edit it but i just wanted to show you if you need to share that the color schemes you've created with your clients that's where you would do that so in this case i'm just going to delete it because it was a test and now you know how to work with colors better than most people do so now in addition to setting the font and color themes there's an extra strap that you can do that could save you time and that is creating some default settings so let me show you what i mean if i'm now in a brand new presentation and i've clicked the layout that says title only so let's say i wanted to create an infographic in here and i wanted to start creating some shape and text so the way i would do that is i'll probably click on some of the shapes let's say i wanted to start with a circle i can put that here and then i wanted to click and start adding some labels so let's say this is a label here that i want to do so by default you'll notice that the text box it's a rever is showing it's a body so that's why it's always important to be using that either body or heading i would recommend to make sure that every time you click on a text box you make sure it has the body tag if you're using some other kind of font because some templates do have that whoever set up that file might have set it up not properly maybe they decided to do arial and now you're going to be creating yourself some conflict so pick the body font make sure that you have that and let's say this is too small what if i wanted to make that a little bit bigger because by default 18 is the starting point let's say i want my labels to be 24 and i want my labels to be that navy not black because by default powerpoint is going to pick the black so i'm going to make that as my setting now to save time i want to make this as the default so what i would do is i would right click on it and i'm going to click save as default actually let me move it to the top so you can see it because on my screen it's not showing that well right click and you'll notice there's an option here set as default text box now if i do that every time i click on a new text box text box you're going to notice that now it's got that navy if i click on it it's got the navy and it's got 24 embodies so this is going to save me time every time i'm creating infographics now what about this shape by default every time you create a shape in powerpoint it's going to start with the primary color the accent so you'll notice remember these were the backgrounds and text and this was our first accent color so usually powerpoint is going to go to that accent color and use that color you know it's nice that's why i recommend you always put your brand color here usually that first accent color needs to be the brand color that might apply for different diagrams well what if i don't want my diagrams to start with blue maybe i want them to start with navy as well so let's say i pick the navy i want that to be the starting point and what if i don't want my shape to have an outline so i'm going to remove the outline and what if i want my infographics to have a bit of a customization maybe i wanted to have a bit of a shadow kind of like some of these presets or i can create my own preset so let me just pick this one here right now you'll notice it's got a gradient it got it's got a bit of a shadow and i can write sample text in here what if i want the sample text to also be a little bit bigger i can do that as well now let's say i want it to be 20 and when i'm happy with that shape i can right click on it and say set as default shape so now every time i create a new shape i'm going to have that as the default so you can choose that and create it strategically or you can keep the basics it's up to you and up to the client try to ask your clients how they plan to use it if you think this will save them time then by all means do set it because these settings will translate to whoever opens the file these default settings are going to be in place well now that you know more about color fonts and the master slide layouts that most people do you are ready to start working on the slide layout so in this segment i'm going to show you how to create custom slide layouts that fit your presentation delivery system now if you recall when we started the starter presentation powerpoint comes in with some standard slides these are the ones that are in the navy blue so when i show you now this is the starter presentation you'll notice that we have the master slide now this one is not usable this is more to control the look and feel of the rest of them what you really can use in your presentations are the title the content the section break you'll see the two content here and some of these basic slides that we're going to customize now in addition to that i usually like to create some additional layouts and these are the ones with the three content three columns uh some ones for the infographics i'll show you and also some ones with image placeholders with the right left image placeholders some numbered lists some testimonials and questions so let me show you what my template looks like and i'm going to walk you through how i've created some of these slides so let's take a look behind the scenes at the template that i'm using for this particular presentation for the powerpoint template masterclass so if i go into view master slide master you're going to be able to see now the template that i have in place you'll notice that i've customized the primary main master layout so it's got the five elements but i customized it with my color and my font and i added this accent here with the triangle and my icon then i'm using the standard title so for example if i right click you're going to notice that this is the same title that came with powerpoint where it says title slide and i've created some alternate cover pages with some image placeholders one that has a place for adding numbers in case i'm doing a course with module one module two the custom cover that i created for this particular course and this is a standard one from powerpoint another standard two column you can see that it's the standard but i customized it to fit my needs this is the one that i always create because i do use that three column format so this is something unique to my presentations this layout i do use on a regular basis so i kept it where i've got a title and some content and i leave the space to add custom infographics this is the standard title that comes with powerpoint this is something i created myself i like to have that title and subtitle and a space below to create my infographics this is the typical section header that comes with powerpoint so this is not something i created it's the one with powerpoint but notice that it's simplified i've kept it in case i need it but in general i do like to alternate and make my section breaks a little bit darker so i create that visual interest with the contrast if the content is white then the section breaks would be dark if the content is dark i like the section breaks to be light then you might recognize the slide this is the one that came by default from powerpoint but i customized it to fit my template now these are custom ones with image placeholders that are new and specific to my template so i'll show you how they work on the front end this is new to my templates as well i like these numbered slides which you have seen already this basic and simple slide comes in handy when i'm doing webinars or video sales presentations where i have to move slides quickly you know those slides that are moving as a video and you've got some words that are matching the narration and and some of the music so usually i do ha like and i do use this content it just has the title so if you notice here it's actually usually using the title setting and you can see here it's the heading so anytime i'm switching slides i have to be aware of which one is using a title and a heading and which one is using a body keep that hierarchy in place as you're building your slides because it's going to make your life easier as you format the slides so i'll show you on the front end what i mean by that this is another layout that i use where it's an image in the background and i sometimes need that simple light text on it of course the blank that comes from powerpoint these questions come in handy when i have a webinar and i need to add a question and i don't have an image so it makes my formatting easier this is when i have some custom testimonials or i just want to share a quote that's inspirational in my content i use this format you can notice once again i've got a light and dark version of it and some ending slides now you might have seen this one with the video that i've used on this particular course so you can create that as well and i've got my endings now these are the ones that came from powerpoint that i personally don't use so i tend to put them towards the bottom so they're out of the way but they're in place in case someone else needs them so how would this work now on the front end so if i go on the front end you'll notice that i've got this cover so if i duplicate it now notice how the power of a template if i click in here and i switch title notice how things have formatted now this manual formatting did not change so if i just click on reset now i reset it to match the template what if i want a custom image i can just click on here and right now i've got this slide you can see how everything is matching up because i paid attention to making sure that i've got the title and i've got the content and this would also work if i switch to that infographic style remember that custom slide that i created or it will also work if i switch to some of the section breaks so you can see here because i've got that customization anything that has a title and a text below is going to snap in place now it's probably not going to work with one that just has just the title because then powerpoint is not going to know what to do with this other section so this would not be a good switch because you notice that this is now not fitting with the template now many people do that mistake and they start keeping template keeping text boxes and forcing them on there it's okay if you do a bit of manual formatting but if you've got hundreds of slides then you need to try to really create slide layouts that fit your content so right away you can see here i've got that image that goes on the left and the content i can start adding more content if i think the image does not work properly i need it to be on the right then i've got all these layouts so that's the power of the template and i wanted to show you now some samples so if i go into the template here let me just show you the ease of use as well with some of the images so i'm going to go into the template so you can see here in my template so this is not the course i've got some of these sample slides you can see how they would look if i switch them around and then i have a section on how to use this template so if someone is brand new to it and they don't know how to use it i've got a style guide that they can follow with my brand colors i've got my logo how to use that logo how the how to use it on specific backgrounds what's the font so you can see that's when you're sharing a template it's got that style guide in it and then some sample layout so i want to show people some of the layouts that can they can be using with it and now you can see some of that center text that i do like to use sometimes and then i can alternate quickly so for example you can see here because they are using that title format they immediately update for this one here you can notice because it's using the proper placeholders if i switch right away that template is going to switch if i think this image might work better on the on the right on the left then i can switch it in some cases for example this guy is facing this way this layout works better because if i choose the other layout it's going to look odd he's going to look like he's looking outside the screen so that's where you get to decide how to use your image placeholders and you decide on the layout and now you know why i create some variations for these slides and now you can see this is the one with the image background and that's the one here with the image background and white text so these come in handy when i have some webinars or i just want to highlight one word some of the section breaks and then i then i show layouts of how to use some of the basic layouts when to use the content when to use that infographic one that i've used so you can see that's when you're providing a template you need to provide samples and show your clients how they can use that template and you can also need to create these slide layouts for example let's take a look and see this layout does have a bit of manual formatting and you'll see it's this this is the one that i've used now many templates that i've bought and they have this particular layout they make the mistake of not using the right template but they just give you one image placeholder and that's not a template a template is the one that snaps the title and the content in place and gives you the flexibility to add specific images and graphics on the side and you can see here this is my quote that i've that i've have this layout and if i switch to the dark notice what happens it switches and this logo here now i'll have to make it lighter so i'm going to ungroup i'll show you in the next section how to do that i'm going to convert this to a graphic and i'm going to go in here and recolor it so let me just see if i think i have to move it here to get that color and i can make it white and notice that's how it would work so i'll show you that in the next segment on how to import graphics the right way then i've got this layout with the q a and i have these questions notice how they come in handy if i have a webinar so now you can see the power of having a template and that's how a template would work it's not image placeholders a template is really text placeholders that allows you to format slides with ease so let's get started now and customize a brand new template i'm going to go here into presentation brand new and i'm going to walk you step by step on how i created some of these custom slides for my particular presentation all right so step one is to go into view master slide master and if you recall our first step is to put pick the font in my case i already have that font family in place and then to pick the color in my case i already have that color palette in place so i've picked them and the next step would be to start customizing this first slide so i usually like to have that as bold and 44 works fine for my case i feel that because i'm using online application but if you're creating a presentation for a larger conference room you might want to make that a bit larger or if you're that definitely if it's going into a large auditorium you want to reconsider the size of the fonts on here in my case that's fine i'm just going to pick the navy i do like having my fonts at navy the next step i usually fix is the paragraph style now by default powerpoint starts with that multiple font multiple line spacing at 0.9 which means 90 line height it might work for some fonts for other i find it looks squished so i'm going to go with single because i'm using a web font and web font and web fonts usually work with 100 rather than 90 height so i'm going to do that and i'm going to do the same thing for the main content the paragraph as well i'm going to make that as well single not multiple so that's fixed now i like my first line on any content not to be a bullet because i don't want my presentations to be full of bullets and then i use a bullet when i want to so i'm going to remove that bullet 28 is a good size in my case now the other ones i do prefer to have them at 24. i don't like the cascading smaller sizes so now that i've got my paragraph in place i want to adjust the paragraph spacing so i want that every time i add a new paragraph to have a little bit more spacing before that so i'm going to make that 16 i find that sometimes works well in my case for the other levels because they're bullets underneath the main paragraph i'm okay if there's a little bit less spacing so i'm going to right click in here and see 5 top spacing is fine so i'm going to leave that as is so i've got my spacing in place now i want to work on the bullets so the first thing i would do is i would click on all of them and change the color of the bullets i want my bullets to be my brand color which is the blue so that would be the color of the bullets now these levels now there's a bit of space here so i want i want this level to start right below the main paragraph every time someone is starting that to do that you would do that here from the ruler so if you can't see the ruler just click on view and you'll find that you have the ruler here and if you prefer to work with guides so you can also use guides but i'm okay without them but let me just show you in case you do want to use guides for example you want to make sure your content lines up to the bottom you can always just use that guide here and if you put that guide you'll notice that the other slides will have it so that way when you're creating subsequent slides you'll make sure not to go below that border so that's how guides would come in handy in my case i don't usually use them so i'm just going to remove that out of the way i'm going to go view i'm going to hide the guides and so now that we have the ruler let's get back and fix these bullets so i'm going to click at the each level i'm going to drag that first triangle and if i slide it here towards the front you'll notice that the bullet has moved and i'm going to adjust the second level so now i want this one to line up with the first line so now this seems like a lot of work but really if you set all of these uh presets on the first slide you're going to save yourself so much time and effort on the subsequent slides and that's what i like about powerpoint over keynote because keynote that you don't have that primary slide so you have to go apply the slides to each slide one at a time whereas powerpoint saves you time so now in this particular case the bullet is still there but i hid it but if someone is on the front end using it so you'll notice that the first bullet is a circle so i want to make my second bullet to be a dash that way so we can alternate and go from circle to dash of course you can pick any kind of bullet you want so i'm just going to go here so i can show you that you've got so many different bullets i would suggest keeping it simple knowing that this file could be opened by someone else so i'm just going to make that as a dash then circle dash circle and then i'm going to make that as a dash again so i'm gonna pick that dash so i think i've got a good hierarchy i've fixed my paragraph i've fixed the the the lineup of the bullets and everything in place now my next step is to make the best use of the layout on the slide so over the years i've identified a size that works for me so i'm going to click here on format object and i'm going to click on the size i like my content to take up most of the space so i'm going to make it 12.33 inches the reason for that is because uh the slide width is 13.33 so if i make my content 12.33 you'll notice now you can see how it's showing that the left margin is 0.5 inches and the right margin would be 0.5 so i think this is a good layout in my case the way to set the size for your particular presentation just go into the page setup and find out what's the size of your screen i'm using the default white screen so you'll notice that the width in north america we use inches so it's 13.33 if you're anywhere else in the world this will be centimeters so pick something that works reasonable and gives you some kind of a reasonable margin without taking up too much space the next thing i want to do is set the space for my page numbers so i like my page number to be on the right now of course for some clients i might highlight the page number more i might give it a bit design but in my case i want to have the ability to switch them on and off and i'll show you how to do that on subsequent slides and also from the front end now the date i don't need but i'll keep it just in case it comes in handy in the future or i'm merging with slides that have a date so they need a place to snap in place so i've got my footer i want my footer to be left aligned so let me just go in here make that left aligned so i've got my footer this would be used for any kind of copyright or any kind of legal text and i'm going to make this tense so in my case i feel this works fine for my layout now the next step is i want to go and add that accent so let me show you how i would go about doing that okay so to add some space for the accent on the side i'm going to make this around 11 inches wide so let me just go make that there i can see it it's around 11 inches wide and now i want to go and draw a triangle so the triangle that i'm using in the corner so i'm just going to create a triangle and i'm going to flip it around because i want it to snap in the corner and adjust it so this is if you're doing the same thing you would customize it for the colors and i'm going to remove the border i don't need a border now for the color if you recall i wanted to alternate between the dark and the white so i want to make sure that i'm picking this white and not this white because if i pick this white and if i switch the background powerpoint is going to make it black and i don't want it to be black i want powerpoint to know that if i pick this white then if i do the switch background it's going to make it a dark navy so that's what i've done here and now i can start customizing the shadow so i'm gonna go for it for to save time i'm gonna get it from the other presentation so i'm gonna put that in here and i'll show you how that works i've got that shape here i'm gonna click on it right now because i can't remember the settings so let me see i'm gonna copy the settings so i'm gonna click here on the uh the clipboard copy formatting and if i go and click on this triangle you'll notice it got that formatting in place so i'm going to save myself time because i can't remember how i did that took me a bit of time to pick a shadow but the way you would do that is you would click here on the shadow and start experimenting with the color and the size and find something that works with the style you want so i'm going to remove this one here and i'm going to put this icon i'll show you in the next segment how to import icons the right way but for now we want to go up for speed so i'm going to just make sure it fits and now you'll notice what ends up happening that i've got the core components on the first master slide now notice how every other slide has them in place and notice how the title here even though because i made this 11 width notice how these titles are picking up what happened here and now you understand why i say never delete anything from the first slide because i see so many templates that are not there and people just create so much manual formatting for themselves and that's where the snap here you can see if i make a mistake with that title if i try to resize it and it's not the right size all i have to do is hide and show again and you'll notice how powerpoint is snapping it into place and the same thing with the footer you'll notice it's working now it's not jamming because i have not deleted anything so the cover we'll get to that later i'll show you how to import the logo and the image placeholders let's first work first on the content so the main content that looks fine i'm not going to change anything this is the one that matches the the first one so that looks fine this is going to be the section break so this one i usually like to fix it as well so i'm gonna keep it right now just like this and i'll get back to it in the next segment the two column now you notice how the two column is fine but i just have to adjust the the boxes now to fit my new layout that's all i have to do i just want to make sure that the left and right are the same size you'll notice how powerpoint is letting me know that the left and right are the same size and the margins on the left and right are the same by using these red arrows so it's very easy to snap things into place now that page number is a bit more towards the right because you'll notice i want that number to be right here because if i move it a bit closer then there's going to be too much space on this edge so you get to decide where you put things but now you know why i have the my particular place now the next thing i need to create is that three column layout so i'm going to duplicate the two column so now that i have a duplicate i'm going to resize these so that i can create a three column format so i i already know that the width four inches would work well so i'm going to move this one over as well and i'm going to make four inches so i've got now two that are four inches now there's another way i can add a third box is i can click on this one and do a copy and paste so then i've got a third one that could be an option or i could go in here into slide master and choose one of the placeholders so i'm gonna click here on insert placeholder get the content then i can click and just draw one that matches in here and then i can now if i start clicking and dragging you'll notice that powerpoint is going to start giving me suggestions so i want this to be around four and so that means i have to move them slightly towards the edge yeah there we go because i want the left and right to be the same and so now i've got my three columns now if you're not sure on the spacing if it looks like this there's more room here than there's here i'm going to click on the arrange so let me just show you how that would work i'm going to click arrange and then i'm going to click align distribute horizontally you'll notice that now they are in the right space now something else i might want to do is make the font on the three columns smaller because starting at 28 might be too much on a two column so i'm just gonna click on all these three and i'm gonna make my font smaller so there it is now you can see that it's starting at 24 and the second level's at 20. so i find that that works well so i've got my two column three column now i want to rename this i'm going to click here rename it and i'm going to call it three column so this is the layout that i use the comparison layout i don't use that much but i'm just going to clean it out either way just in case it does come in handy when i'm merging presentation so once again i'm using the left and right is the same you'll notice it's snapping now telling me the edges are the same so for now i'm just going to keep it like that to keep the left and the right the same that's about right even though it's not 100 accurate on this level but it should be fine for now the title slide i'm going to keep as is but i wanted to create the second one so as you can see here i've already created it but i want to show you how i would do that so i'm going to right click on the single title i'm going to right click in here and you'll notice that i've got my title in place but i want to resize it i want that to be centered so i'm going to move it here to the center i'm going to make this a little bit smaller so there's a bit of manual formatting but powerpoint still knows that this is a title so when i do use move things around powerpoint is going to understand that this is my title so there's a way now if i'm not sure if this is centered or not because i'm trying to center it but it doesn't seem that powerpoint is snapping in the right place there we go now it's snapping in the right place so i know that this is center i'm going to move it up to the top and i want to create a second text box below because this is the heading and instead of using the content because notice that the content has tables charts i don't want that i just want a simple text so i'm going to click on the insert placeholder and i'm going to pick text that's all i want i want text and i'm going to add it right below this title so this is going to be my two text subtitle area notice how powerpoint immediately picked up the formatting i had i had here so now you understand why we always start by creating the formatting and the hierarchy here because that's how powerpoint plays with things so now i'm going to delete the bullets because i don't want bullets on my secondary title and i'm going to make this centered and i'm going to make this text box text box smaller so now i've got a style that allows me to create infographics so i've got a heading and i've got a subheading and i have lots of room to create custom infographics so right now i'm going to go right click and rename the slide and i'm going to call it instead of title only one because the title only was the one above it i'm going to call it titled centered so now i've got these two layouts that i use a lot and they're in the right place blank is fine now these are the the ones that come with powerpoint by default so i'm gonna keep them and i'm just gonna give them a bit of a clean up so in this particular case i wanted to fit the layout of my template so i'm just going to snap it like that now this font is too small considering my style so i'm going to start it with 28 just like you notice the powerpoint did not pick on that because it's not a text box it's just a it's not a content box it's a standard text box so and i'm going to make this a little bit bigger so i think this works better for my formatting and i'm just going to clean it up now i don't want people on my team or myself to use this for content you'll notice that it says click to edit master text styles i don't want that i want this layout only to be used if i have a chart on the side and some content in place so i'm going to make this easier for for the front end i'm going to remove this and say instead of click to edit master text i'm going to say click to add click to add charts or tables because that's the only reason i want anyone to use the slide layout so you can notice it's right here and that'll be the formatting now this is the image placeholder that i don't necessarily use but i'm just gonna either way clean it up in case i'm merging and in case it does come in handy for some applications once again i'm going to make that 28 and this one's going to be the 36 and for the image as well i'm going to resize it to fit the formatting you'll see that this layout will not work on my template that's because i got this this triangle at the top so if i just put an image on top of it this layout will not work for my template but i'm just keeping it anyway just in case it comes in handy for future applications or if i really need it what i can do is i can click on the format background and i'm going to say hide background so you'll notice if i hide the background notice what happens to that triangle here so i'm going to hide it so in case i do need it it's in place but ideally it's not something i want to use as well and this one here with the charts i'm going to keep it because most charts would not necessarily reach the edge if it does i can always hide the background on the front end so now you see we've got the basic content in place next thing i want to show you how to import graphics the right way how to import your logo and how to customize image placeholders so we can create some fancy cover pages and that we can create some fancy image placeholder slides so our next step into creating image placeholders and graphic is to learn how to deal with graphics in powerpoint how to create import and edit graphics and that's exactly what we're going to do in this section so before i dive more into the graphics i wanted to talk about how to import your logo now notice this logo is animating so i have it animating one letter at a time and the reason i can do that is because this logo is imported as an svg i broke it apart into powerpoint and i was able to convert it to a graphics and then edit it i'm able to animate it i'm able to make it any color i want so i'll show you how to do that in a minute but before that i wanted to show you what most people do now anytime somebody is importing a logo into their powerpoint template most likely they might end up bringing a jpeg because most people know how to work with a jpeg everyone has a camera these days and anytime you take a picture most likely the extension is jpeg but the issue with jpeg is as you can notice it always has a background so if you put your logo on a white it might look okay but then if you try to put it on any other color you're gonna get end up with that box which doesn't look that great especially if you're creating a template and it's your own brand if you're showing somebody else's logo on your slides it might be understandable but if it's your template then you better have a really great logo another issue with jpeg is every time you save the file and which you might save the file over 100 times while you're working on it jpeg images start losing quality so it's not a great idea but if you have no other options that might be the only thing the next best thing is to import your logo as a png now a png is great because it's in many cases transparent so no matter what color background you put it on it's going to look great now you can see in this case it looks great on white but when you put it on any other color well i can't read this logo anymore because i cannot recolor it but an svg which is a scalable vector graphic i can convert that in powerpoint i can edit it i can change its color and i'm going to show you how to do that now if vector graphics come in many formats they come as a dot ai they come in as a dot eps file they can come in as a pdf but you cannot edit them in powerpoint the only file you can edit in powerpoint is if you import as an svg convert it and then edit it so let me show you how that would work all right so let's go back to our presentation under the slide master and we're going to import the logo and put it on the cover slide so i'm going to move this here to the edge and i'm going to move it to the left and we'll figure out the size and the fonts later for now i want to bring the logo actually let me just move it over so i can show you a bit more about the logo so i've got here the logo in various formats you'll notice that usually logos vector logos so we decided that we're not going to be using jpeg and no png we need to be using a vector logo usually that's an illustrator file format so let me show you the difference what happens if you bring in illustrator now powerpoint understands that file format but if i try to recolor or break that apart it's not going to let me if i go into group and group powerpoint isn't understanding it still as an image and if i click on the color and i try to recolor it notice what happens if let's say if i make it red notice that the background becomes red but i cannot edit that logo so the ai format is not right what about eps many of the logos come as eps so you'll notice once again if i go into the eps if i say fill and i pick a red color once again it's not letting me break it apart just change picture powerpoint seems to read that as a picture now the same thing with the pdf because pdf is sometimes used on uh on a keynote so let's just try it once again to make sure i want to even prove for myself what happens here so if i recolor it the same thing you'll notice that it thinks of it as a picture now the only file format that allows you to convert is that svg now now you see why i'm telling you to bring it in as an svg so i'm going to bring in that logo as an svg now notice what i can do if i want to recolor that logo i can click on it here let me just click if i make it all blue notice that now i can recolor that logo to anything i want so that's the power of an svg and there's another format if i want to break it apart and animate it now i can the group might not work but if i convert to shape you'll notice that this is the only file format the powerpoint allows me to convert to shape notice what happens now now i've got these elements in place so if i wanted this icon i can copy it and now group it so i can group that and use that as the top corner now you know how i got my icon and then this logo here i can animate if i want or i can regroup so i can just regroup it and now i've got this format in case i need to have it as white on the darker slides i'm able to edit so now you can see why i like to import everything as a vector now if you want to lock it back in and you don't want it to be editable as a graphic you can do that you can just go in here and cut and then you can do edit paste special and notice that powerpoint lets you paste it as a png if you wanted to do that it's up to you if you fixed it and you created a white and dark version and you want to lock it in you can do that if you wanted to save it back as an svg you can or if you can keep it as a microsoft office graphic so in this case let me just bring it back to svg so that i can lock it in place and now i can resize it and start formatting my cover slide all right so i put the logo in place and i put the header and the subheader in the right location to match somewhat what we had on the slide but now how do we go about to create this shape and the placeholder and have another here image placeholder when at the top we've got this icon so to remove this icon for the first thing i need to do to create that space is i need to click on hide background now notice by hiding that background i've taken out that icon without really affecting the slide here or without having to create white boxes because that's what sometimes people do because if i create white boxes to hide it and i start changing the background color then i'm going to face some issues so that's why i need to make sure that my slides are as clean as possible now the next thing you might ask yourself is do i need that footer on the cover slide because you do have that option you can just hide and show for example if you go at the top slide and you look at the main components we've got those five we've got the title date footer page and text but if you go to the subsequent slides you only have the title and footer to show so that's why you've got these two placeholders in place so i would say keep it even though in most cases people might not need it because if you take it out let me show you if i hide it and go into the normal view and somebody is working on this presentation and they say insert header and footer and now they click they want a footer and they want a slide number let's say they want that in most cases they don't need a date so i'm going to say magnus media and they say apply it's not going to work and so that's why people get frustrated and they start adding manual pages and they think why isn't this working so i would highly recommend is you go back to the slide master keep that footer on and let users decide when they go into normal view do they want a header or footer so if they go now and say insert header and footer and they pick a slide number and a footer they can do that here media and they say apply you can see now it applies so now you see it why i say try not to delete anything try to keep the main components into place because if you want to avoid future conflict so let's go about now creating that shape we've got that space now we need to create that icon placeholder and the image placeholder so before to do that i wanted to show you that there's a little bit of a gap here between that icon placeholder and the image and why do i have that that's because of the hierarchy that powerpoint works when you're adding images so let me just copy these as a as a sample and i'm going to take them to my starter presentation here and i'm going to show you how to create this image placeholder and we're going to use this as a place and then i'll take it to the cover but i do need a place for room to show you how it's done so let's start by creating this shape and i'm going to show you what ends up happening with powerpoint if you don't create that gap so i'm going to create first of all this shape to match what we have here i'm going to readjust the corners so that they fit the right sides and i'm going to flip it at 45 degrees let me see now we've got that let me try to match the shape let me see is it gonna snap it's not snapping so let me just put it on top make sure i have the exact shape so i have the exact shape now i don't want any outline so i'm gonna remove that outline and if i wanted that gradient so the way i did that was i chose one of these gradients and and then i customized it to fit my need so for now i'm not going to add any gradients for this because i'm still using it to create shapes so what i'm going to do is i'm going to copy and paste let me just do paste now i've got another shape and i want to get that shape of the image placeholder so let me just click that here i think that's about right so i've got my image placeholder so now i want to overlap them and create my image placeholders let me make it another color so you can see so in powerpoint if i make this an image placeholder and i've got this shape by default even if i in the back end even if i go in here and say bring to front when i take it to the front uh and add a picture somehow powerpoint always gives priority to the picture so it ends up putting the picture on top and i don't want that because if the picture is on top it's going to end up cropping that box for me and i want people to see that full box so i have to create this cropped here where you can see it there's a white gap so to do that i'm just gonna copy the shape and i'm gonna create a white box so let me just go here into the home and give it a color of a white so that i can see it and i'm gonna put this blue at the top bring that to front so now i'm gonna reshape that white to create the sizing that i want the crop shape you can see here i'm trying to make it fit i think it's about as close as the other one let me just bring it up a little bit to the front so if i'm not sure i can always use the arrange and align center so i'm going to align center and align middle so now i know they're in the right place so that looks almost the same as this one slightly different but for now just for the sake of this example actually let me just bring it up a little bit to the front it's snapping so now i've got this shape and i've got the white border and i've got the blue but i don't want to keep that white i actually need to crop it manually so i'm going to click on these shapes i'm going to click on the white and the red shape and i'm going to go into shape format and then i'm going to click here on merge shapes and say fragment now that i fragmented it let me just recolor them so i can see them i'm going to go delete those fragmented pieces you're going to notice now i have that white space so now i can take the shape and go over to the cover and create the gradients and add an image placeholder and a set image so let me just take these up to the top actually i'm just going to copy this as well let's bring them all so i can copy the styles all right so i'm going to go back to the cover here and paste them so that i can use it as a guide you'll notice that this is almost about the the right location of what we had here before so i had a set image on the first slide and i had an image placeholder on the second so to do that i'm just going to move this out of the way because i'm keeping these mostly to copy the styles once i'm done i'm going to duplicate this so i can create a second one with an image placeholder but for now i want to go and get an image to put in this particular box so i can't remember where i got this but it was most likely from here so i'm going to go insert picture and i'm going to say stock photo so i'm just going to pick now a stock photo i'm going to say city let's find something that looks a little bit kind of that would match my template maybe this one here this looks like it could match it's got that blue city so i'm going to put that here and i'm going to move this out of the way so now i can take that image and send it to the back and i'm going to think of okay how would that fit in the text box so i can pick the right location i want it to fit in the text box in the i mean the shape not the text box let's see maybe i need those buildings like that so i'm going to choose the image and that shape and then i'm going to go back here to format shape merge and i'm going to say fragment so now i can delete the outside and you can see i have the image so i want to get that shadow that i have here now of course you can put your own shadow you can go into the shape effects shadow you can see here i've picked the first one so maybe i can do that the same here i can go into shadow and pick that and you can see it's got my image shadow and i have that spacing now it's not exact but you get the idea of how it's made so now i need to add the icon so i'm going to go in here and bring that icon from here and and since it's a vector icon i can just paste it so i'm going to bring it over here and now i can make it white and now you can see why i like to work with vector files because if this was a png i would not be able to work with it so now i have my cover slide and i can animate it because if you notice on my cover here i created some animation so it's up to you if you want to animate them on the slides i have already animated this so let me show you how it would look like my animation you can see it's got that kind of an animation which is another video so i'm not going to mention animation right now but i wanted to show you that you can create animations even on placeholders you can see here i've i have that animation so i'm going to go now and create an image placeholder here that so that you can use it to put your own image so first of all i'm going to get the icon so let me put the icon in here and then we can remove these and i'm going to create make this blue dark navy box into an image placeholder so to do that i'm going to click on slide master insert picture and i'm going to place an image a picture placeholder so you'll notice here i just want to make sure that that picture covers all that box and i want to make sure now that i'm selecting the picture i don't want that icon so let me just move that i don't want the oh it's not letting me so let me just move the picture to the back just temporarily move to the back sent to the back so i just want to pick the picture and pick that let's see if it works i might have to put the picture at the front because sometimes i feel like right now the picture is at the back you'll notice if i say it's at the back so let's see if it works and if you click the picture in that shape i have a feeling it might not if i if i say intersect oh it worked so it did work and you can see now if i move over i've got that uh image placeholder so i want to make this visible because right now it's not very clear so i'm going to right click on it i'm going to say format shape i'm going to give it a pattern so i can see it you can see right now it's white i can't see that pattern so i'm going to make that pattern foreground white and the background blue now i can see it so i can pick one of these patterns so that people know that this is a picture placeholder so i also like to see that word because right now you can see it's not visible so you can what you can do with that word you can also center it and i can make it in the middle so that people can see that it's going to prompt them to add a picture to click on the icon so i've got my image placeholder now i need to add that shadow if you recall that the first picture had a shadow so i'm going to add a shadow and now if i wanted to i can go and animate those as well so you can see i've got my permanent cover i've got my cover with the image placeholder and now i can click on animation and animate any of these so that's how you would create image placeholders for covers and subsequent covers so i'm going to rename the slide because if you recall the first one was title slide so i like to keep my names clean so i'm going to call it title slide alternate so that's how we created the cover and the sub cover so you'll notice i i have these i created one with the number which you can do and some of the extra image placeholders so let's see what about the section break so you can see here i have a section break let me show you how i did that as well i went here into the section break right click you can duplicate and so i'm going to create this one here rename section header and i'm going to call it dark so let's rename that and i'm going to go here into background and i'm going to make it dark now notice how everything switched even that top triangle because i had picked the right white so now you can see why i pay a lot of attention to the top slide and now i just want to make the footer a little bit lighter darker because i think it's too much of a lighter font so i'm going to go in here and pick rather than the white i'll pick one of the grays i think that way it'll match some of these as well so i've got my section break so now how do i go about and create this uh blue box and this one so i can just go to the top here copy this one add it and you can notice because it's a dark right away the white became blue so but that's okay because i can always go back in here and switch it so i'm going to switch here back to the white so i've got that white background and i want to hide the background i don't want this in here so i'm going to click here format background hide so you can see now we took that out from the top corner you'll notice i can do that even on the dark background so i'm going to remove it and then i can create a second shape and give it that transparent background so to save time i just wanted to show you i'm going to put that here in place sent to the back and that's how you would create section breaks so i've got this in place so you can see how we did the covers the section breaks and now if you wanted to create image placeholders kind of like the ones we have here now it's up to you what i would usually do is i would take this primary slide and i would duplicate it so that's how i usually create them let me just move that towards the bottom and what i might do is i might move this slightly to the edge and then i get to decide if if i need an image placeholder with a with the background or not so for example you'll notice in my idea here i've got one with no icon i've got one with an icon and and then i've started creating they're very simple shapes and now you know how to do them and you can see by putting that blue in the background because the image will always be at the front so in these particular cases i did not want to intersect them but on the cover i had to create that intersection so that i can make sure that the icon shows so let me scroll what else do we have then i i have these slides which is also very common you just have to create these boxes animate them that's what i did you'll notice it's got the title so it's very basic i think by now you should be able to create that you can duplicate the same one here duplicate the top one and move things around and then you can hide you can see on this one the background is hidden let me see here if i rename format background you'll notice that the background is hidden so i think you get the idea and in this particular shape as well is just the title so what i might do is i might duplicate this one and the way i would do that is i would duplicate and then i would create a section i would create text because i want to make sure it's actually a title not not a text box you'll notice i'm working with that hierarchy i want to make sure that there's always that title in place so that's where now i would go make it center and then i get to decide do i need this icon or not i'm not sure do i have it here yes i have that icon so i can keep it and then i can create a dark version of it and rename it of course every time you create something new you rename it the same idea with the questions the same idea with the icons here with the quote marks this is very simple and the same thing with the ending so i hope this gives you an idea of how to go about and create these custom image placeholders and now you can work on it for your presentation so how do you come up with ideas how do you know how to create these text boxes so in the next segment i'm going to show you some samples of where to find inspiration and how to create layouts based on existing slides and designs so now you know the principles of setting up a template but how do you come up with design inspiration because it's easy to know the foundations and the principles but coming up with custom layouts that fit the brand can be a bit challenging so in this segment i'm going to show you where to find design inspiration for your templates now for design ideas powerpoint does come with some starter ideas so if you start a new presentation and you click here on the on the design you're going to find of course that theme option that we talked about earlier earlier so you can pick any one of these and then you can just go into the view master slide master and start customizing the boxes and the layout to fit your to fit your brand so you can see that there's quite a bit of a variety but of course there are millions of people that are using powerpoint so chances are they are doing the same so this could be an option if you're in a rush there's another option if you are a member of office 360. you can click here on the design ideas and you'll notice that powerpoint will start showing you some ideas now this seems to be a hit and miss because they seem to be different every time i click on them but if you only have one slide and you're on the title powerpoint is going to suggest some themes for you so for example if you like one of these let me just see if there's anything a little bit better i'm going to click you can see here still not that great let's keep clicking more now this is ai generated so it's generated by artificial intelligence so let me see if i pick this one let's see that looks a little bit different and now if i go into the layouts you're going to notice the powerpoint has already created that theme for me so now i can go in here and start customizing it and i'll show you how to do that in the next video but for now i wanted to show you that this could be an option but these are all still limited and they still they're not really that creative so i want to show you some of the resources that i use to go get some templates i have a membership with this website here called invato elements i think i pay around 150 a year and i have access unlimited access to download videos templates music sounds photos fonts there's so much including presentation templates so if i click here on presentation templates you're going to find that there are over 32 000 powerpoint templates that i can use for inspiration now i've been a member here for several years and i've downloaded many of them and including this one so i'm going to show you this one here that i downloaded recently now you might notice something familiar about this template which is let me just see this image placeholder you might see i use this here as an inspiration where is it this layout for that newcastle template so i did like that layout now i downloaded this because i have a membership so i can just download them and the way i would download them is if i'm a member so you can see here i had downloaded it and i tagged it for newcastle so that way i can tag and buy a license for a particular client so because i use this template already for newcastle i'm not going to download it again because i have downloaded it now i want to show you what it looks like so this is the file that i received and i'm going to open it now and i'm going to show you how i use it as a starting point for inspiration now at first glance this looks amazing you'll notice like wow this looks good i can use a lot of this but then if you start clicking on some of the elements you're going to notice it's not a heading so you can see here whoever created that file doesn't know how to work with templates because you notice that the theme is still calibri and they haven't done any of that and then i figured okay well what about the layouts let me click on the layouts once again look at this is this a template or not so i'm going to walk you through into the view master slide master and unfortunately you're going to realize that this is not really a template it's just a bunch of image placeholders so that's what i find they are great for inspiration but they are a major disappointment if you plan to use them as a template so in the next video i'm going to show you how you can take a file like this how you can clean it up and turn it into a template because right now it looks great maybe you can borrow some of the image placeholders but apart from that it's not really a template and it's not it's good for manual formatting not necessarily for systemization especially if you're in a large organization this would be a huge disappointment and unfortunately that's what many of the templates on this website are because i've downloaded so many of them some of them are better than others but i would say so far 95 have not been set up as a template so in the next video i'll show you how to clean them up now my other resource is i also have a membership with canva i like canva because i get some inspiration and some get some ideas so i also sometimes come in here and you'll notice that now canva does have presentation templates so you can see here they have a lot of starting points that i can use so for example if i need a brand style guides i can say here brand guideline presentation and you're going to notice that there's so many of them so i would usually like that and let's say we can pick one here 2020 brand guidelines let's say i like this one so let's just pretend actually it looks has too much grade yet let me go find something else let's see what about a business template plan okay so this could be an idea we can use this as a starting point but it doesn't seem to have image placeholders i'm trying to find something with some image placeholders let's see about this one okay this one seems to have some nice layout so if i say apply all 10 slides you're going to notice that i've got some ideas now to work with now the advantage with canva is it lets me download it as a powerpoint so in the next video i'm going to show you what happens actually let me just show you right now so you can see why this still needs cleanup so i'm gonna download it as a powerpoint let me download and i'm gonna show you how this file looks like and what you can do with it so i'm gonna save it saved it into my downloads and now i'm gonna go get that from the download folder so this is the one that i just got from canva it's a good starting point i do like these shapes i can use them for inspiration but once again if i look on the template look what we have here it's not a proper template so this still needs a lot of cleanup the first thing would be to clean up the size so you can see here it's using a custom it's not using the powerpoint so there's a lot of cleanup that needs to be done here in the next video i will show you how to clean something up like this and turn it into a template so congratulations you just completed part one in video number two i'm going to show you how to take any file and clean it up and convert it into a reusable template so that you can make your life easier your team's life easier and even your clients life easier so watch out for video number two [Music] you

Channel: Magnas Media

Views: 14,960

Keywords: PowerPoint, PowerPoint Template, PowerPoint Color Set Up, PowerPoint Font Set Up, PowerPoint Themes, Image Placeholders, Brand Style Guide, Communication Design, Magnas Media, Hwayda Kater, PowerPoint Training

Id: mhfpolp9rAs

Length: 98min 23sec (5903 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 14 2021