Customize the design and layouts

When you create a presentation you want to save as a template, start with the cleanest file possible, and get your design in place, first.

Let’s begin with Design, and the Themes gallery.

For a presentation featuring wine, I’d like a deep, rich theme; I’ll try this one.

Over in Variants, there’s an alternative, purple color scheme for this theme. I’ll use that.

Next, I’ll click View, Slide Master to make changes to the slide master.

I’ll select the slide master, the top slide, to make my first change: This will apply to the text footer. The company’s URL should go there.

So, let’s click Insert, Header & Footer; check Footer, and paste in the URL. Then we click Apply.

There’s the footer text, but let’s make it bigger: I’ll select the placeholder on the slide master, click Home, Font Size, and change the size to 16.

Because I’ve put the footer on the slide master, it appears in every master layout.

Now, let’s make changes to the master layouts. This is a way to really customize a presentation.

We’ll start by deleting the layouts we don’t want. As long as no slide is using a given layout, you can delete it. You select it and press Delete.

We’ve got the layouts down to five, and we’re going to customize one of them, the Picture with Caption layout.

We use this layout for the wine photo and description. I want to resize the placeholders and make the fonts bigger.

The Picture placeholder needs to fit the dimensions of our cropped photos. To work with it, I’ll right-click it, and click Format Shape.

Then I click Size & Properties, and Size.

Before anything else, I’ll uncheck Lock aspect ratio so that I can control both height and width.

Then I’ll type in the height and width of our photos, and press Enter. I’ll close the Format Shape pane for now.

And I’ll click View, Gridlines as the gridlines will help me position the placeholder.

Then I’ll use the arrow keys to nudge the placeholder over and up, just eyeballing the placement.

To widen the text placeholders, I’ll press CTRL, select them both, and drag the right side. We can turn off the gridlines.

To increase the font sizes in the text placeholders, I’ll select the placeholder, click Home, and change the font size for each one.

To add more space above the body text, I’ll right-click the placeholder, click Format Shape, and Size & Properties.

I’ll close the Size options and click Text Box. Then, for Top Margin, I’ll bump up the spacing to .2.

That looks better. Another useful change I’ll make to this layout is to this prompt text: How about “Wine name goes here.”

To rename the layout, right-click the thumbnail, choose Rename Layout, we’ll call it, Wine Profile, and click Rename.

We’re done with our customizations to the slide master. I’ll click Normal to switch back to Normal view.

Now, I could make all these customizations available for any presentation by saving them as a theme--I’d click Design, open the Themes gallery, click Save Current Theme, and name the theme.

But, my goal is to include actual slide content and formatting, as well; a template format allows me to do that.

So, with our design and layouts in place, let’s click Save, name the presentation—we’ll call it Coho Premium Selections, and click Save.

Up next: We’ll add slide content and formatting and then save the presentation as a template.