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Thank heavens for templates. A template is simply a PowerPoint presentation file with predefined formatting settings. PowerPoint comes with more than 100 template presentations designed by professional artists who understand color combinations and balance and all that artsy stuff. Have a croissant and celebrate.
Because the templates that come with PowerPoint look good, any presentation you create by using one of them will look good, too. It's as simple as that. The template also supplies the color scheme for your presentation. You can override it, of course, but you do so at your own risk. The color police are everywhere, you know. You don't want to be taken in for Felony Color Clash.
Templates use the special file extension POT, but you can also use ordinary PowerPoint presentation files (PPT) as templates. You can therefore use any of your own presentations as a template. Simply save the presentation as a template by using the POT file extension.
 | Because a template is a presentation, you can open it and change it if you want. |
To begin a presentation using a template, simply open the template, save the template under another name (so you don't modify the original), and begin work.
To apply a template to an existing presentation, follow these steps:
1. Choose the Format-->Apply Design Template command.
The Apply Design Template dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 1.
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Figure 1: The Apply Design Template dialog box. |
2. Rummage around for a template you like better.
If none of these templates floats your boat, then snoop over in the mysterious 1033 folder and dig around in the Presentations collection. (Why do they call it 1033? Who knows? Forget about it, be glad you found it, and move on.) To get to the 1033 folder, click the Up One Level icon on the Apply Design Template dialog box. You are in a folder called Templates. Templates has two subfolders: Presentation Designs (where you were before) and the 1033 folder. Choose 1033 and check out the choices.
If you updated PowerPoint 97 to the PowerPoint 2000 version and had a few favorite templates that no longer appear on your list, fear not. In addition to the templates in your Presentation Designs folder, you see another folder on this list called Office 97 Templates. Follow it to a folder called Templates. In it, you find two other folders where your old favorites can be found. They are called Presentation Designs and Presentations (now called 1033 in PowerPoint 2000). Relax and enjoy.
The differences in the two groups of templates are:
1033 (or Presentations): Contains templates that include suggested content. These templates are used by the AutoContent Wizard to create skeleton presentations when you tell the Wizard the type of presentation that you want to create.
Presentation Designs: Contains designer templates. These templates do not contain sample content, but they look marvelous.
When you click a presentation name, PowerPoint displays a preview of the template's appearance in the Apply Design Template dialog box.
3. Click the Apply button or double-click the template filename to apply the template.
Make sure that you like the new template better than the first one!
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