How to Create and Apply PowerPoint Templates

PowerPoint tutorial: this tutorial will show you how to create and apply PowerPoint templates.

In earlier versions of Microsoft PowerPoint you could create a template for specific design style and apply that design template to an existing presentation. Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 is a little different. In this newer version what it used to be called design template are now known as themes. Themes and templates are similar but they have slightly uses. A template is like a pattern or blue print for your slides when you’re building a presentation from scratch. Themes are collections of complimentary colors, fonts and design elements that can be applied to a presentation once it’s built. A template can include theme, color and fonts, theme effect and background colors as well as specific layout elements. Microsoft PowerPoint comes with a number of built in templates that you might find useful. When you click on the Office button and select new to create a new presentation, look for the installed templates option in the dialog box. When you select the installed template, you’ll see a list of thumbnails for the built in options. Just select one that you like and click create. PowerPoint will open your new presentation in normal view, so you can see the thumbnails for the different layout pages and the slides pane on the left, and then you can start adding your own content to the built in template, so for example, in this first slide I can place my cursor in the built in text boxes, highlight the text and type in my new text. You can also save your own custom template if you’ve created a presentation that you like, and you want to use the same blue print in future presentations. You may want to first save the file under a new name, so you don’t accidentally overwrite your original presentation. Then in the new file go up to the view tab in the top navigation and select the slides sorter view. Now, delete all the slides in the active presentation on your screen. The easiest way to do this is to press the control key and the letter A at the same time to highlight all of the thumbnails and then just hit the delete key. Next, press control plus the letter M twice to insert two blank slides for your new template. The first slide will be a title slide and the second will be for title and content. Don’t make any changes to these slides we’re just setting up the template for now. Finally, click the Office button in the top left corner of your screen and choose save us then select other formats. In the dialog box name your template file and then open the pull down menu for save as file type and select the PowerPoint template then click save. Now, the template you’ve created will be available to use when you created a new presentation, so I can go up to the Office button and select new then on the template’s list I’ll select my templates. Here in the preview I can see the template that I just created and select that one. You can create a template from an existing presentation, but if you have a presentation open and you want to apply a different design you actually have to use a theme. So, in addition to saving your new design as a template you may also want to save it as a custom theme to have it available for other presentations. To do this mouse click on the design tab in the top navigation and click the arrow to open the drop down menu for the themes group. The template you’re working from will be the first thumbnail on the menu, but it hasn’t been saved as a theme yet, so that’s what you need to do. In the bottom of the menu just click on save current theme and in the dialog box give it an appropriate filename, then click save. Now when you open an existing presentation you can choose the theme that you just created from your template and apply it to some or all of the slides in that presentation. Here’s a quick demonstration. I’m going to open another PowerPoint presentation that I’ve already created. Then I’ll go up to the view tab and select slide sorter, so I can see all the thumbnails. If I want to apply the theme to just some of the slides I can highlight only those thumbnails, but I’m going to apply it to my whole presentation. So actually I won’t highlight any of the slides. Then I’ll select the design tab in the top navigation and I’ll open the menu for the themes group. Here, under custom themes I can see the theme that I just created from my new template, so I’ll just click on that theme and I can see that all of my slides here in the slide sorter view change to reflect the new design. Themes and templates give you a lot of control over the look of your presentations, and they make it easy for you to recreate the same design styles from multiple presentations. With the latest version of Microsoft PowerPoint you can change the whole look for your presentation with just a few easy clicks.