Diving In to PowerPoint Templates

Quick reference

• 00:04 In the previous lesson where we were taking a look at creating new
• 00:07 presentations, I told you that there are two different ways that you can do this.
• 00:12 You can create a new blank presentation, as we saw, but
• 00:15 you can also create a new presentation based off of a template.
• 00:20 And fortunately PowerPoint contains an entire library of pre-designed inbuilt
• 00:25 templates for you to use.
• 00:26 And templates can be particularly useful if you're new to PowerPoint, and maybe
• 00:31 you're not particularly comfortable with designing a presentation from scratch.
• 00:36 They give you a really good base to work with, and
• 00:39 take a lot of the hard work out of it for you.
• 00:42 So let's explore the template library in PowerPoint.
• 00:46 Now you'll find your templates underneath the File menu.
• 00:50 And if we jump down to New, because we are essentially creating a new presentation,
• 00:55 this where you'll see all of the templates.
• 00:58 So if we scroll down, you'll see that we have two headings, once called Office
• 01:02 which is the one I am currently clicked on, and one called Personal.
• 01:06 Now I have a few templates listed underneath Personal.
• 01:10 You might not have anything in there, that's completely fine,
• 01:13 it just means you haven't created a template yet.
• 01:16 Let's jump back to office and take a look at what we have in here.
• 01:20 So this is your template library, and
• 01:22 all of the templates within PowerPoint are organized into different categories, so
• 01:27 it really depends what kind of presentation you want to create.
• 01:32 I have a search bar at the top so I can search the template library for a specific
• 01:36 template, or I could utilize the suggested search options underneath and
• 01:41 browse through the templates within that particular category.
• 01:46 So if I was looking for a template that was geared more towards charts,
• 01:50 I might want to click on the Charts suggested search.
• 01:53 And it's going to pull back all the presentations which have more of
• 01:57 a charts skew.
• 01:58 Now I'm going to click on the Back button just to jump me back
• 02:01 to my main template library.
• 02:03 Now if I have a specific template in mind or even a specific category,
• 02:07 I can utilize this search bar to look through the PowerPoint template library.
• 02:12 So maybe I'm putting together something like a sales pitch.
• 02:16 So I'm going to type in sales pitch and hit the Enter key to run that search.
• 02:24 And it pulls back all of the templates that are tagged with those key words.
• 02:28 And I will say that all of these templates are completely free,
• 02:32 they are provided by Microsoft, and they are all customizable.
• 02:36 So for example, this one just here, which is the healthcare office pitch deck,
• 02:41 if you work in a different industry of course you can customize this.
• 02:45 It's not just for people who work in the healthcare industry.
• 02:49 So once you find a template that you think you might want to use,
• 02:52 it's a simple case of clicking on the template.
• 02:55 It's going to open up this window, which basically gives you the name of
• 02:59 the template, who's provided the template, so in this case it's come from Microsoft.
• 03:04 And then we have a bit of a description about what that template is.
• 03:09 It tells us the download size, and if we're happy with all of that,
• 03:12 all we need to do is click on the big Create button.
• 03:16 It's going to download that template and open it within PowerPoint.
• 03:19 And you can see here that a template is not necessarily just one slide.
• 03:24 This is basically giving me a complete slide deck of slides that I can
• 03:28 customize to suit my needs.
• 03:30 And the great thing about this is that I haven't had to spend any time just staring
• 03:35 at a blank presentation, wondering how I'm going to design this template.
• 03:39 It's basically done it all for me, and I can now go in,
• 03:43 I can customize the images, the text, and tailor it to my own needs.
• 03:47 And I can take a look at all these different slides simply by clicking on
• 03:51 the thumbnail in the pane on the left hand side.
• 03:54 Now when you open a template, again, it's just going to open with a default title,
• 03:59 so in this case presentation six.
• 04:01 So I'm probably going to want to save this template.
• 04:04 And this is a really important thing to note,
• 04:06 because you save templates in a slightly different way.
• 04:10 So maybe this is a template that I want to reuse over and over again for
• 04:13 different presentations, and just customize certain elements each time.
• 04:18 So I want to make sure that I save this as a template as opposed to a regular
• 04:23 PowerPoint file.
• 04:25 So the process to do this is very slightly different.
• 04:28 What I'm going to do is jump up to File, go down to Save As, and
• 04:32 then I need to choose a folder.
• 04:35 I'm going to click on Browse this time.
• 04:37 Now normally what I would do when I get to this stage is I would navigate to
• 04:41 a folder where I want to save this file.
• 04:44 But in the case of templates, you don't really need to do that.
• 04:48 The first thing you want to do is go down to where it says Save As Type.
• 04:52 And you'll see that by default it's going to save this as a standard
• 04:57 PowerPoint file with a .pptx extension.
• 05:00 But if we're saving a template, we want to make sure that we save this as
• 05:05 a PowerPoint template file which has a different file extension of potx.
• 05:10 Now when I click on this file extension, look what happens.
• 05:13 It jumps me to a specific folder, and that is the custom office templates folder.
• 05:19 You can see that I already have a few templates saved into there, so
• 05:23 all I need to do now is give my file a name.
• 05:26 So I'm going to call this sales pitch presentation.
• 05:29 I'm going to save it into the Default Templates folder and click on Save.
• 05:35 Now you might be thinking to yourself,
• 05:36 well what if I don't want to save it into the Default Templates folder?
• 05:40 What if that's hard for me to find?
• 05:42 What if I want to save it into one of my own folders?
• 05:46 Well you can definitely do that, but
• 05:48 let me show you the main advantage of saving to that Default Template location.
• 05:52 If I close down this file, if I go to File and then back to New and
• 05:57 scroll down to the area where I have all of my templates.
• 06:01 If you save your template into that default template folder,
• 06:05 you'll then find your template located underneath the personal tab.
• 06:11 And you can see here at the bottom I have the sales pitch presentation.
• 06:14 So this makes it really quick and easy for you to find any of your templates.
• 06:18 What I could also do if this was a template I used fairly frequently is pin
• 06:22 this to the list, which is then going to pin it in the top half of the screen.
• 06:26 If I want to reopen that template at any point, if I click on it and say Create,
• 06:31 it's going to open the template, but
• 06:34 notice that it's opened as a new blank presentation.
• 06:38 So it just says presentation seven.
• 06:40 So any changes I now make are not going to overwrite that original template,
• 06:45 it's going to be essentially a new file.
• 06:48 And what this effectively means is that I can go back and keep reusing that
• 06:52 template, saving it as different file names every single time depending on who
• 06:57 I'm pitching to, what client it's going to, how I'm using this file.
• 07:02 So that is pretty much how templates work.
• 07:04 They are a really great way of giving you a starting point from which to work from.
• 07:09 And of course, aside from the inbuilt PowerPoint templates, you will find many
• 07:13 different templates available online for free which you can download and use.
• 07:18 That's it for now, I will see you in the next lesson.

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