Forum Discussion
PowerPoint Template versus Theme
This answer was a good read Greg - thanks for sharing your thoughts.
As I think of more content creation starting from versions of PowerPoint that are not on the PC (e.g. PPT Online, mobile device or even Mac), using a Theme as a starting point doesn't really solve my problem of making it easy to apply the corporate style. (I don't see any way to deploy a Theme to show up in the default list that a user can choose from).
But your explanation helps me understand that a Theme can be applied after a presentation has been created, versus a template that has to be done at the beginning.
Greg Edwards- where do you guys host your company themes and how do people know where to find them?
You actually can deploy themes as part of a corporate image or in a user's roaming profile. It's just a matter of where you store the THMX file. If it's saved in %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates\Document Themes, then it will automatically be added to the Design > Themes gallery and appear for that user in PowerPoint. That said, themes really aren't great for stock layouts and content that you want to reuse. For that stuff, you need more of a proper template.
And it turns out you can apply a template (or at least the template's themes) to any presentation using the method I mentioned in my previous reply. Just select Design > Themes > Browse for Theme, select any PowerPoint file (PPTX or POTX), select Apply to apply its themes/make its themes available to use. Technically, it's because your presentation ingests the masters (but not the content) from the source presentation. So, that can actually be a good poor man's approach to resuing themed content.
To your second question, it's more of a conceptual exercise for me of how things should work. My company is, unfortunately, a Box shop, so most of the OneDrive and Sharepoint-centric strategies I described go right out the window. We have a shared folder in Box with all of our corporate PowerPoint templates in it. Technically, ours aren't even templates; they're just plain old PPTX files. When someone needs to start a new presentation, they download a "template" locally, open it, and start hacking away at the content they don't need. It's not a great system, IMO.
That said, you can still leverage a service like Box to do most of what I mentioned in my previous reply. It's just a bit more manual to integrate those stock slides into your deck without some zany sync workarounds. For instance, I could sync the Box templates folder with my local Custom Office Templates folder, and PowerPoint would at least display templates in PowerPoint as options when I click File > New > Custom.
The problem is that without extensive metadata, it's really hard to find the exact boilerplate slide you need. One option might be to save each slide (or small sets by topic or layout) into separate PPTX files to make them more modular and easier to browse. Another would be to add lots of metadata to the content management system to help users locate the right files when they search.
Ultimately, it's all going to come back to how those "template" slides are built, and honestly, most content creators don't have a clue how to do it properly. The minute they apply a "background image" by dropping a picture on the slide and moving it behind all of the other placeholders (instead of the "proper" way of doing it via a master or at the very list Design > Format Background) or start tweaking fonts, colors, sizes, and layouts directly on the slide (again, instead of using proper masters and sticking to them), then that slide becomes way more difficult to reuse in a different presentation., for the simple reason that it's going to stick out like a sore thumb. It's just really hard to get that level of buy-in from all but the most hardcore PowerPoint users.