Presentation Enhancements - templates and conversions
While there has been significant improvements in the Presentations tool over the last couple of years, we’d like to see other capabilities similar to what’s offered in PowerPoint. Maybe these suggestions are already documented but I'll risk offering them up again.
- Ability to convert slides to a new template / format. Company’s often rebrand during acquisitions, new strategy rollouts, etc. Those often result in new corporate standards for Presentations for both internal and external use. PowerPoint makes it easy to drag and drop slides from one presentation to another with the option of retaining the original template/style or converting to the new template. The conversion is not perfect, but’s it’s often very good. Our company is converting to a template with new backgrounds, fonts, colors, etc. We have Wdesk Presentations with dozens, if not hundreds of links that we use on a quarterly basis and I’ve yet to find an easy way to convert those.
- PowerPoint templates allow you to place text objects on a template slide with a default location, font type, size, and color. When using that template the user then clicks on the object and just starts typing. They can change any of those attributes if desired/needed but they are initially presented with the proper defaults. It would be great if Wdesk Presentations slide layouts allowed setting default text boxes and attributes the way PowerPoint does in their templates.
Thanks for your consideration,
Greg
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Great suggestions all around, Greg.
I'm getting these ideas separated and shared on our end. I would definitely encourage others to share their use case/need for these too, and any insights.
We have the same headaches internally regarding item 1. Below are some tips we provide on updating slide layouts and text styles.
- Open the new presentation template. In the new template, locate a slide with text, and highlight it within the text block. In Edit click the Styles dropdown, and select Edit Style Guide.
- In the tab bar, click Export, and save this file and then return to the new Presentation
- In the View tab, click Layouts and copy all the slide layouts in the left panel
- Open your prior Presentation and navigate to View, click Layouts and paste in the new layouts from your clipboard below the existing layouts along the left panel. Click Exit Layouts.
- Locate a slide with text, and highlight a text block. In the Edit tab, click the Styles dropdown, and select Edit Style Guide
- From the Style Guide Editor, Import the style file you saved previously and return to the file
- In Slide Properties, you'll need to update each slide Layout to the new backgrounds
- Once all slides have been updated, you can delete the previous Layouts
Give me a holler if there are questions on these steps. Thanks again and chat soon!
0Hi Mike,
same questions Greg posted came to me after using Workiva for a couple of days now. The "Layout Robot" functionality for documents and presentations would be highly appreciated. Also, the 2nd feature mentioned above would help quite a bit to create a proper slide library from which any user can pull the required slides and does not need to check the position of text boxes first. Any progress here?
Thanks a lot,
Julius
0Hello and welcome to the community, Julius! Thanks for sharing your insights. They are much appreciated.
As far as progress here, it is slow going. Both these items remain proposed with our product team and haven't really budged much. However, each little bit helps raise it to the top, so thanks for chiming in.
We'll keep taking in requests here and will keep you updated on progress as well. Let me know what questions you have for me in the meantime. Thanks again and happy Friday!
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