Most presentation drafts I receive from clients are a soup of different slide templates, with colours, fonts, and styles all mixed up. To clean things up takes so much time that in most cases, making a slide from scratch is faster.
The combination of PowerPoint’s architecture (going back to the 1990s) and large groups of people collaborating on documents is the toxic cocktail that causes all of this. My app and my template store are my first attempts to put an end to this.
In the absence of a permanent solution, here is what you can do to vaccinate yourself against the worst cases:
- Ask some one marketing communication to email you the original clean template, and see how it works. Likely, it does not. Delete master slides you do not need.
- Create a rectangular shape that you like: correct colours, correct font. Make sure the bullet points align when you drop to the next line. Right click the shape, and set as default
- Repeat the same for a plain text box.
- Now, every presentation that you create, either starts with this blank master totally empty, or you copy someone else’s presentation into this master.
- And share your clean template freely with anyone who is interested.
(Or, start with an empty SlideMagic template, download it here for free)
Cover image by Pascal Kahle on Unsplash