Document-Wide Formatting Changes

[Guest]

We've recently changed our corporate look and feel, and we're in the process
of converting all of our old PPT presentations.

The conversion is fairly smooth, except that every slide has to have a
change in the main body's line spacing. We've been doing this slide by
slide, but I have to think there's a way to do it for the whole presentation.

Any ideas?

 

[Sonia]

It sounds like you aren't using a corporate wide template. Is that true? Or
have people just not used the Slide Layouts and placeholders?
--

Sonia Coleman
Microsoft PowerPoint MVP Team
Autorun Software, Templates and Tutorials
http://www.soniacoleman.com

 

[Guest]

Hi Sonia,

Thanks for the quick reply. In the past, we weren't... and nobody really
knew how to use PowerPoint properly. The problem is that now we have dozens
of old training presentations that need to be revised. We have a template
now, but my problem is that I can't seem to get it to force the line spacing
when I import them, whereas I can with fonts, etc.

I don't think there's a command to do it, but if there's a better way to
import the old slides, so that the template does more of the work, I'd be
happy to hear it.

Cheers,

Ryan

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

We've recently changed our corporate look and feel, and we're in the process
of converting all of our old PPT presentations.

The conversion is fairly smooth, except that every slide has to have a
change in the main body's line spacing. We've been doing this slide by
slide, but I have to think there's a way to do it for the whole presentation.

Have you tried changing the linespacing on the body text placeholder on the
Slide Master? You might then have to reapply the master a time or two, but you
can do that to whole batches of slides by selecting them in the slide sorter
and doing Format, AutoLayout, Apply (or Reapply)

 

[Sonia]

If the authors faithfully used placeholders and the line spacing is set in the
master, applying the template should change the line spacing in the
presentations. If it doesn't you might try re-applying the slide layout. If
they didn't use placeholders then there isn't a way to do it from the UI except
with the Format Painter, once you have one text box set the way you want. My
guess is that it could be done via VBA, but one of the VBA coders would have to
help us there.

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

If the authors faithfully used placeholders and the line spacing is set in the
master, applying the template should change the line spacing in the
presentations. If it doesn't you might try re-applying the slide layout. If
they didn't use placeholders then there isn't a way to do it from the UI except
with the Format Painter, once you have one text box set the way you want. My
guess is that it could be done via VBA, but one of the VBA coders would have to
help us there.

If it's Silly User Trick #12 -- "I'm smarter than this stupid program so I'll just
delete all these dumb placeholder things and draw my OWN text boxes" it's tough to
sort out.

Hard to know which of the text boxes on the slide contains the text that's
supposed to become the placeholder text again.

BUT, a fairly quick manual fix:

- Apply the desired Slide Layout to the slide. If the text isn't in a
placeholder, it'll stay a random text box on the slide.

- Click inside the random text box, press ESC and then Ctrl+C Ctrl+X (copies it
then deletes it)

- Click inside the placeholder and press Ctrl+V

The text is now in the placeholder and will follow the master formatting.

 

[Guest]

The Esc-C-X trick worked like a charm. The problem is that on the old
slides, there's just a random text box. If I reapply the formatting, it just
adds another box over top of it.

Thanks a lot for your help!

Ryan

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

The Esc-C-X trick worked like a charm. The problem is that on the old
slides, there's just a random text box. If I reapply the formatting, it just
adds another box over top of it.

That suggests that Silly User Tricks are indeed at work here. ;-)

If I have this pictured right, reapplying formatting (to a Title & Bullets slide)
*should* add another text box since it recreates the body text placeholder that the
Perp deleted. That's what you want to paste the copied text into.