One of my tasks this summer has been to get a number of Powerpoint presentations ready to go on the companion website for my new book, A Writer’s Craft. Since I was planning to edit them for general consumption and since I wanted to give them a more consistent look, I decided to come up with my own design based on the book cover. This proved easier than I thought, once I delved into Help a little bit, but Microsoft’s explanations were a little murky, so I thought I’d explain what I did in case it can help others.
Note: These instructions are for Microsoft Office 2016 for Mac. On Windows or other versions, you can probably do the same things, but they may work a little differently.
To create a template was fairly easy. I started with a blank Powerpoint presentation and then added images and formatted text on the Master pages. To get there, you choose Master and then Slide Master from the View menu, or as I discovered after the fact, click the View tab on the menubar and then click Slide Master.
I made separate designs for the title page and subsequent pages, but you could place your design on the main master page at the very top. I did format my text there, so it would all match no matter which master page I chose to work with. I picked my text colors, font, and sizes on the main master, then added images to the title master and other page masters. Since I could copy and paste the images, I went ahead and put them on all the different page masters, even though I don’t use them all. Now I have a complete template set up with my design in case I decide to use those layouts in the future.
To create the images above, I opened the book cover image in Photoshop and selected part of the cover, cropping out the rest. I saved that image as a TIF file (though jpeg ought to work well, too), and then I took a slice of the image and copied and pasted into a new window to create the line. I was fortunate that my cover image is hand-sketched, so copying and pasting the pen strokes looked fine — you couldn’t see lines where I had pasted the image on top or beside of other images, which I needed to do to make the line longer than the original image. I took the line image and made it higher with copy and paste, then used the elliptical selection tool to create the sloped shape. Going back into Powerpoint, I placed and resized these images to create my design.
That couldn’t be much easier, as long as you have an image you can work with, but the next step was a little harder to figure out. I saved my file as a template, which was great if I wanted to create new presentations, but to work with existing presentations meant figuring out how to get this design into them. That took a little more digging in Help, but eventually, I realized I needed to work with a theme instead of a template.
The next step was to save my template’s theme, and that’s where Help was a little murky, but eventually did yield the answer. You have to leave the Slide Master view, then on the Design tab, you can save your theme. But how to get there isn’t immediately apparent. Help mentions a down arrow to click, but you have to hover the mouse over your themes to see this arrow.
If you click on it, you will see a bunch of themes, and at the bottom, you find the options to “Browse for Themes” or “Save Current Theme.” I clicked on that, and then I was able to go into my existing Powerpoint, go to the Design tab, and click on the theme I wanted. My presentation now had the images and text as I had created them in the template/theme, and I could adjust it and edit to work well with the new layout.
As you can see from the image above, I created a few themes. A couple are just alternates I was playing with, but two are for different sized presentations. Back on the Design tab, you can choose your presentation size. My originals were 4×3 for traditional monitors and projectors, but Powerpoint wanted me to use 16×9 for widescreen, which is its default. So I created a template for each size, saved both themes, and then made two versions of each presentation. First I got everything the way I wanted it in the original 4×3 size, then after saving it, I changed the presentation size to 16×9 and then chose the right sized theme: otherwise my images got distorted with the change of size, so I needed to recreate them for the wider format on a new template and then save that theme.
Creating the new size template was just a matter of deleting the images that were distorted, then replacing them with the same image from the file, so they retained their original dimensions. Then I resized, if necessary, to make them fit in the new layout. I didn’t have to create new images, in other words, just place them into the new design from the original files.
This made changing the look of my presentations relatively simple. Once I had my template and theme, I could apply it, and for the most part, everything worked. I could fix the things that didn’t look right in the new design, and edit anything else I needed to change before sending these off to my publisher.
Now I have all new presentations to go along with my textbook. They are edited to be for a general audience — I removed some specific instructions I use in my classes and kept the more general description of content. And they are available in two sizes for standard and widescreen monitors and projectors. It all took less than a day, and the hardest part was the editing.
Kendall Dunkelberg 