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Creating Your Own Templates

Creating your own templates can be as easy or as difficult as you make it. The actual saving of the file as a template is very simple; the variable part is how much design work you want to put into the template. Do you just want to modify an existing template slightly and save it under a new name? Or, are you thinking of building your own masterpiece including custom graphics and sample content? There's a big difference. Since this is only Chapter 2, let's think "small" for the moment, and as you read more of this book and learn how to do more things, you can expand your custom template's feature set.

Note

When saving a template, PowerPoint makes no distinction between templates with or without sample content. If there are slides in the template, PowerPoint will use them if starting a new presentation based on it (through AutoContent Wizard, for example) but will ignore them if changing the design of an existing presentation. The distinction is all in where you store the templates and how you employ them.

Creating a Design Template

A design template should not include any sample content. If you base a new presentation on a design template that does have sample content, PowerPoint will include it, so don't include any "junk" slides in your template. Work only with the Slide Master when making changes to the file that you will save as a template.

XREF

You'll learn about the Slide Master in Chapter 3.

Suppose you want to base a new design template on an existing one. There are two ways to go about it. You can either open the original template (POT) file, or start a new presentation based on it. Either way, you then make your changes to the master slides and save the file as a new template (POT).

Where to save it? That depends on how you want to use it. The default location is C:\Documents and Settings\Your Name\Application Data\ Microsoft\ Templates. See Applying User Templates and Third-Party Templates earlier in the chapter.

If you want it to appear in the Slide Design task pane, however, you should save it in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Templates\Presentation Designs instead.

Here's a play-by-play of the process:

Open an existing template file, or start a new presentation based on the desired template.
Switch to Slide Master view (see Chapter 3) and make any design changes to the template as desired.
(Optional) Display the Slide Design task pane and edit the color schemes for the template as desired.
Choose File⇨Save As. Change the Save As type to Design Template (*.pot) and save the template in the appropriate location. Figure 2-17 shows the file being saved to the default location for user templates. Then close the file.

Figure 2-17: Save a file as a Design Template to reuse it repeatedly later.

Creating a Presentation (Content) Template

Making a content template is similar to making a design template except that instead of just editing the Slide Master (again, see Chapter 3), you also create some sample slides. I won't get into the process of creating slides here, as it's addressed in Part II of the book. Here's what to do:

Follow steps 1-3 in the steps in the preceding section.
Close Slide Master view if it is still open, and add the desired slides to the presentation.
Choose File⇨Save As. Change the Save As type to Design Template (*.pot) and save the template in the default location for user templates (C:\Documents and Settings\Your Name\Application Data\ Microsoft\ Templates).

Note

If you plan to save the template in a location other than the default for user templates, change the Save As type setting to Design Template (*.pot) before you change the save location. When you select Design Template, the file location automatically changes back to the default save location, even if you've already manually selected a different one.