How to Create Your Own PowerPoint Templates

I'm always surprised when people ask me if there's a way to create their own PowerPoint templates in order to share them with others at work. By "surprised," I mean I assumed everyone knows you can take any Office document and save it a template--PowerPoint is no exception. Here's a great explanation from the forthcoming "Microsoft® PowerPoint® 2010 Plain & Simple":

You can develop a presentation that forms the basis of other presentations and save that presentation as a template. This can save you a great deal of work in setting up themes, layouts, and slide master settings for each new presentation.

Custom shows are subsets of the slides in a presentation that can be saved right inside the same file. Custom shows may contain only some of the slides of the presentation or rearrange the order of slides. For example, if you have a master presentation on your entire product line, you can save custom shows that focus on each product line separately and show only the presentation that relates to an individual customer’s needs.

A feature called Document Inspector allows you to search your files for hidden data and remove it before saving the file. Finally, you can add a digital signature to your presentation. A digital signature assures whoever opens the file that it came from you. (Once you are comfortable with the Ribbon interface, you can explore customizing it to contain the tools you use most often.)

You can save any file in a template format (.potx). A template can contain various custom settings, such as changes you make to the slide master, custom layouts or animations you created, or themes and font choices you applied. Your templates can also contain text or graphic elements in placeholders. By using a template as the basis of a new presentation, you can not only save time but guarantee a consistency of look and feel among all your presentations.

Remember, after you open a template, you need to save it as a regular PowerPoint presentation with a new name so you don’t overwrite the template with presentation-specific changes.

If you have access to a SharePoint site or a company intranet, you might consider sharing templates across an organization so all presentations have a consistent company look and feel.

• Make any settings or changes you wish to the presentation, and then click the File tab.
  
• Click Save As.
  
• Click the Save As Type field and choose PowerPoint Template.
  
• Enter a name in the File Name field.
  
• Click Save.

If you or somebody else wants to use the template with an earlier version of PowerPoint, you should choose PowerPoint 97-2003 Template in Step 3. This is useful if you are sharing a template with people working on earlier versions of the software.