Slidebank lets you apply a range of PowerPoint templates (sometimes called 'Slide Master Layouts') to a saved presentation file (or to a slide selection) to see how they look - a kind of 'Visual Templating' feature. Here's how it works...

Firstly, what many people call PowerPoint ‘Templates’ usually contain one or more ‘Slide Master Layouts’, each of which in turn contains several ‘Layouts’.

These are viewed using the ‘Slide Master’ tab in PowerPoint, allowing you to make custom changes to each type of layout, for instance logo and font changes.

The whole collection of layouts can be downloaded as a single ‘PowerPoint Template’ (.potx) file by doing the following:-

Open up the desired presentation in PowerPoint then go to ‘File’ > ‘Save As’ and choose a folder. Then, from the drop-down list alongside ‘Save as type’, select ‘PowerPoint Template (*.potx)’, as shown here…

…this saves a .potx (PowerPoint Template) file to your hard drive, ready for you to upload to Slidebank.

Having successfully saved a .potx Template file, you can upload it into Slidebank by dragging and dropping the file onto the content library in Slidebank. Slidebank will recognise it as a template file and will store it in a ‘Templates’ folder.

Slidebank Administrators can view and manage these Templates under 'Setup':

Under Setup, Admins can manage which users can access a template by clicking on the 'Options' button next to the template name and choosing 'Share template'. The template can then be shared with users across the account:

You can apply the templates available to you in Slidebank to existing presentation files (that you own or have editing rights over), or to the slide selections of new presentations that you are building.

To apply a PowerPoint template to your file:-

1) Double-click any slide tile in the slide sorter. Choosing a tile from the upper window will apply the template to the file that already exists in Slidebank. Choosing a tile from the bottom 'selection window' and double-clicking it, will apply the template to your new slide selection.

2) Click on the 'Templates' tab that appears to the left of the slide preview

3) Click on a template to preview the effect it would have on your slide

Here you can see that Slidebank has made the slide conform to the third template in the list. In doing so it has changed the slide background to dark green.

You can scroll through all the preview slides using slide selector buttons at the bottom of the screen to make sure the template is a 'good fit' for each slide…

Please be patient since this process may take time to move between slides. You can try out other templates by clicking the others on the left too.

4) Once you are happy with the result, click ‘Apply Template’ to apply it to all the slides in this deck ‘for real'.

5) Slidebank now processes all the slides in order, displaying the results then updating the original presentation file in the library.

6) After the update is applied, you might also like to click ‘Download’ for a copy of the newly-updated file from the library…

​NOTE: Slidebank may sometimes be no more successful at applying templates than PowerPoint itself, and for similar reasons. For example, closer examination of slides 2 & 3 above reveals some typical text formatting errors. These have happened because the author of this deck did not follow the pre-defined template layouts for those slides but inserted unexpected text objects instead.

In other words, just as with PowerPoint, Slidebank Templates only work well when slides are created according to a pre-defined template ‘recipe’. Hence, if all slides are 100% compatible with their templates, then applying a similar template, but having different colours, fonts etc., should work well.

However, as with PowerPoint, Slidebank does not automatically correct formatting errors which, if serious, might then need to be corrected using PowerPoint itself.
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Nevertheless, if you are dissatisfied with the results it is easy, using Slidebank versioning, to step back to a previous version and delete the newer one; allowing you to try another template instead. To do so, click the ‘clock face’ on the file icon, then click the ‘eye’ next to an older file version to revert back…

Lastly, you can click the trash can next to the unwanted version to delete it.

Footnotes:

1) As mentioned above, neither Slidebank nor PowerPoint will correct templating errors automatically. So if you have many new templates to apply (because of a branding exercise, for example) we recommend applying them in PowerPoint directly, for the simple reason that you’ll be in the right place to correct any errors that are likely to result. Slidebank is, however, a very good place to gauge the scope of effort that may be needed.

2) Although you can upload PowerPoint .potx Template files into Slidebank, it is not posible to download .potx files to your hard drive - you'll need PowerPoint for that.
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