Using Design Templates

Now we’ll do something that’s awesome. We’ll apply Design Templates to our slides.

If you have used an older version of PowerPoint you will see something really neat about PowerPoint XP – you can save individual Design Templates to individual slides if you desire. Something that was really tedious to do in the older versions.

For those using PowerPoint for the first time we’ll show you how to use Design Templates on individual slides or on all of the slides in your presentation.

You can be in any View (Normal View or Slide Sorter View) when you select Design Templates. Click-on Format in the Menu Bar, and then Click-on Slide Design (as shown below).

Once again the right side of your screen will look like the image to the right. Click-on Design Templates. The Apply a design template area shows you views of the various designs that you may use in your presentation.

We used the elevator bar on the right side of the Slide Design area to move up and down until we found a design that we liked.

The image on the left shows our choice (see left arrow). We then moved our cursor over the right side of our design choice until we saw the small triangle (see right arrow). We clicked-on the triangle and the drop down menu to the left appeared.

You’ll notice that there are several choices. The main choices are Apply to All Slides and Apply to Selected Slides. If you are in Slide Sorter View you can click-on a slide and then click-on Apply to Selected Slides and you will see this design appear on that single slide (or multiple selected slides). If you are in Normal View and click-on Apply to Selected Slides, you will see the design appear on the slide on your screen.

This is the BIG difference that we mentioned on the last page to “old” PowerPoint users.

You can choose the view you like best when you are applying Slide Designs (Normal or Slide Sorter View).

Notice, in the image on the last page, that we selected Apply to All Slides. When we clicked-on this selection, our slides appeared (in Slide Sorter View) as you see them below.

Notice that when the design was applied that in addition to the background changing, the text, formatting and colors of some of our objects also changed. In a minute we’ll look at our entire slide show again. As you go through your show, you might want to make a note of color changes that do not enhance your presentation. Most notably, when you choose Dimming for text, the Dimming often is more noticeable than the text. So, you might want to change your dimming color to work with your slide show.