You assign a layout to a slide by going to the Home tab and clicking the Layout drop down and then clicking the most appropriate layout design for your intended slide content: Assigning layouts to slides in PowerPoint * This information is not accessible to you and if you delete placeholders or layouts from the master, you can seriously mess up your template, breaking it beyond repair.Īnd that’s why layouts, the creation and management of them are so important. Placeholder Unique Identities* called “idx” (hidden data in the XML of the PowerPoint file).Slide Layout Type* (hidden data in the PowerPoint file).Behind the scene, there is a lot of hidden information about a layout that you and I can’t see in PowerPoint and it must match all of the following properties before it correctly maps a layout to a slide: You might assume that it uses the name of the layout such as “Title and Content” but it’s not as simple as that unfortunately. Now you might ask what criteria PowerPoint uses to map one slide’s layout to another. If your slide master includes images, this behaviour can make your presentation files very big, no, huge, over time and more importantly, impact the consistency of your brand. An orphaned master in the above example might be named “1_Office Theme” and if multiple erroneous masters have been created “2_Office Theme”, “3_Office Theme” and so on to infinity and beyond.
These erroneous layouts and/or masters are often referred to as orphaned layouts and masters. You can see when this happens as layouts are either added with an unfamiliar name, taken from the old master, or are prefixed with a number and underscore: But you probably won’t notice until your file size is bloated, or someone asks you why your slides are no longer on-brand. When it fails, PowerPoint has no choice but to create a new layout or even worse in some cases, a new master with many layouts in your presentation file. Sometimes it works, but more often it fails.
Now, when you copy content from your old presentation based on the old template to your new presentation based on the new template, PowerPoint tries to work out how to reassign each slide to a layout.
What often happens is that the old template doesn’t contain the same number, identity or type of layouts as in the new template. This is very common in organisations that have issued revisions to templates either to make minor corrections and design tweaks or as a result of a more significant rebranding program. However, the monkey in PowerPoint comes to life when you work with presentations that have been built on different templates. If you only ever work with one template, then your life will be filled with smiles and sunshine.
Each layout uses a set of content placeholders and each placeholder, depending on its type, may contain text, pictures, video or more complex content such as tables, charts and SmartArt.īacking up a bit, any and every presentation you create is based on a template, often deployed as a potx file, and each template contains all the slide masters and layouts used to keep your visual content on-brand. Layouts define how your content is consistently laid out on the slide in a way that respects your brand. Why are layouts in PowerPoint so important? I’m going to walk you through the pitfalls of slide master layouts and show you how to manage them and recover any deleted default Office layouts using VBA. PowerPoint is an awesome tool for creating your latest presentation template but if you’re the person responsible for creating them in your organisation, you’ll know that PowerPoint often behaves like a badly-behaved monkey.