Paste text problems -- ready to cause violence

[leftnotracks]

For some reason, people want to use PP to print sales sheets for
products. I'd like to make them in, well, anything else, but in case
the salespeople need to edit them, we're using PP.

So I have hundreds of items, each on one page. I've made one page
(slide) just the way I want it, with the text formatted as I like. I
now want to make each item into a page with the formatting as in my
sample.

I have tried so many ways to copy formatting, but none work. The style
painter and Pick Up/Apply text Style tools (eyedroppers) ignore line
spacing, paragraph spacing, and bullets.

I thought if I formatted my outline levels on the Slide Master I could
import the text as an outline in Word. No dice, as I stated above.

Edit > Paste Special, then Unformatted text pastes the text is as
black 24 pt Arial plain, no matter the size, style, colour of the
selected text.

If there were custom Styles as in Word I'd be sitting pretty. If I
could paste unformatted text and have it adopt the style of the
selected text I could do it, but it would take longer (all that switch
to Word, Copy, switch to PP, select, Paste, repeat six times for each
item). If I could fully copy formatting and apply it elsewhere I could
to it, too.

So far as I can tell, the only way to get what I want is to manually
format each piece of text. Please tell me that this 20 year old
program is more sophisticated than that. Please!

 

[Guest]

Have you tried Paste Special? If you select that instead of paste and then
select Unformatted Text and paste into an existing text box, it'll pick up
that text box's formatting.

 

[Bill Dilworth]

Hey Trackless,

Well, you present an interesting case. When using PowerPoint for purposes
outside of it primary and secondary roles, how much support should you
expect to be built in to the software? That's partly where we come in -- to
offer suggestions on ways you can do the work you need without being driven
to violence.

Soooo...
There are a few things that may help with the manual method of doing this.
1) Copy slide 1 (the correct formatting) and paste as slide 2
2) on slide 1 delete all the data
3) Copy slide 1 (now your blank "template") and paste after each of the
slides you need to integrate data into
4) On each C&P there will be a tag that will offer "keep text only"

You may also benefit from using macros to automate a lot of this copy and
paste work. Are the slides set up the same on all 88 of them? perhaps a
macro could cycle thru the objects and determine if the object can be placed
into the correct place on the new slide. This might require more effort
than just muscling thru the C&P process, depending on how exactly the slides
were handled.

If you would like and the presentation file is of a reasonable size (under
10 MB), I'd be happy to look at it and offer additional solutions to your
problem. Just email it to the address in my signature.


--
Bill Dilworth
A proud member of the Microsoft PPT MVP Team
Users helping fellow users.
http://billdilworth.mvps.org
-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
vestprog2@ Please read the PowerPoint FAQ pages.
yahoo. They answer most of our questions.
com www.pptfaq.com
..

 

[leftnotracks]

I already said above:

Edit > Paste Special, then Unformatted text pastes the text is as
black 24 pt Arial plain, no matter the size, style, colour of the
selected text.

Doesn't work.

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

For some reason, people want to use PP to print sales sheets for
products. I'd like to make them in, well, anything else, but in case
the salespeople need to edit them, we're using PP.

So I have hundreds of items, each on one page. I've made one page
(slide) just the way I want it, with the text formatted as I like. I
now want to make each item into a page with the formatting as in my
sample.

Our Merge addin is made for just this type of thing, among others.
http://www.pptools.com/merge/ (free fully functional demo available there)

You might need to do a bit of footwork to get the text to come in the way you
want; hard to say exactly w/o seeing examples, but if you'd like to give it a
try, I'd be happy to work with you on it.

If there were custom Styles as in Word I'd be sitting pretty.

That'd be a less automated approach than Merge, but also workable.

See http://www.pptools.com/shapestyles/ (free demo also available there and if
you only need to apply a couple of styles, you may not need any more than the
free demo.)