Locked lesson.
About this lesson
Let's explore the pre-designed templates available in PowerPoint. We will learn how to search for templates, browse categories, pin favourites, load them, make changes and save them for reuse.
Exercise files
Download the ‘before’ and ‘after’ PowerPoint presentations from the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.
3.06 creating-and-saving-new-presentations - Exercise.docx51.3 KB 3.07-exploring-the-powerpoint-template-library - Exercise solution.docx
865 KB
Quick reference
Diving in to PowerPoint Templates
PowerPoint contains a variety of free, in-built, pre-designed templates to use. Templates are particularly useful if you are new to PowerPoint as they provide a starting point from which to build a presentation. With templates, many of the stylistic elements are included like fonts, effects, colors and layout. Templates can be customized to fit our own specific needs and then saved as a template file for re-use.
Aside from the templates available in PowerPoint, there are many templates available to download for free online. We can even design our own templates from scratch.
When to use
Use a template if you would prefer to start from a pre-designed slide deck as opposed to a blank slide.
Instructions
Search for a Template
- Click the File tab.
- Click the New tab.
- Scroll down to the templates area.
- Browse the templates by category or enter a specific search term into the 'Search for online templates and themes' box.
Loading a Template
- Click on a template to select it.
- Click the Create button.
New templates will open as a new document. Customize the template as required.
Saving a Template
Templates are saved in a different way to regular PowerPoint files. Whilst it is perfectly ok to save a PowerPoint template to a folder of your choice, it is advantageous to save the template to the default template folder. This means that the template can be accessed quickly through the 'Personal' tab.
- Click the File tab.
- Click Save As.
- Click Browse.
- In the Save as type drop-down, select PowerPoint Template (*.potx).
The folder path will change to the default, Custom Office Templates. Click Save.
Reuse a Template
Once a template has been saved it can be reused.
- Click the File tab.
- Click the New tab.
- Scroll down to the templates area.
- Click the Personal tab.
- Select the template.
The template will open as a new, unsaved PowerPoint file. This means that any changes made to the file will not affect the original template.
Hints & tips
- To make our favourite templates even easier to access, Pin them to the list.
- Only templates saved to the default custom templates folder will show when we click on 'Personal'.
- 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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