From chaos to cohesion: How to standardize your organization’s PowerPoint presentations
Improve branding and efficiency with consistent PowerPoints
It is often said that the most important aspect of branding is consistency. So why do different departments within the same organizations use PowerPoint presentations with drastically different branding? From slide layouts to colors to fonts, so many businesses present conflicting decks. What’s worse is different employees had to take the time to make all these decks!
There are two major downsides of inconsistent presentations:
- Brand dilution: Brand recognizability comes from consistent design and communication. Branding is only successful when every element of your organization’s presentation is rooted in the core values and mission of the brand. Using different-looking decks presents an un-unified view of the business, obstructing the message you organization is trying to convey.
- Massive time losses: This is the silent killer. Organizations without clear guidelines or tools to maintain deck consistency often don’t realize how much time employees waste on building new decks. Time is spent creating unique slide layouts, selecting colors, and testing 20 fonts before settling on one, only to change it last minute before a big client presentation.
Building an organization-wide template deck
The goal here is to build a library of template slides that everyone in your organization can use as starting points whenever they need to create a presentation.
- The Slide Master: The first essential step is setting up a Slide Master. The Slide Master acts as the default slide layout of your template; each slide added to your presentation is a duplicate of one of the Master slides. The master is also where you can set the default colors and fonts for your deck.
- To access the Master View, go to PowerPoint’s View tab and select Slide Master.
- To change the default fonts, click on the Fonts button and select Customize Fonts at the end of the drop-down menu. A window will open, prompting you to select your official fonts. Ideally, your entire organization uses the same font so select it wisely.
- To change the default colors, click the Colors button and select Customize Colors at the bottom of the drop-down menu. A window will open where you can select all your official colors. For each color, click on the drop-down menu, select More Colors, and enter the appropriate hex color codes according to your organization’s branding.
- Building your slide layouts: An easy way to build your template deck is to aggregate all the best slides from every department’s previous decks. You should also make sure to have a good variety of slide types (e.g., title slide, graphs, section dividers), meaning you might have to build new layouts. This will reduce the chances of people in your organization deviating from the template if they’re looking to make a slide that’s completely different from everything in your template deck.
To give you a starting point for these slides, the PowerTools add-in comes with tons pre-built slides that you can leverage to build your organization’s template deck. These including every slide layout from traditional text slides to graphics, timelines, and flowcharts. You just need to change their colors and add your logo to them.
Ensuring the Template Deck Gets Used
Building template slides is not the hard part; it’s ensuring everyone in your organization uses them.
- Communication Strategy: Simply having organization-wide templates does not guarantee that all departments will use them. You need a communication strategy and tools to ensure implementation. Leadership must communicate the importance of using the templates to ensure everyone is aligned.
- PowerPoint slide-library: The best way to ensure your template deck is used is to install a slide-library feature. PowerTools allow users to add slides from their organisation’s library without leaving their current deck. Without this feature, employees must 1) receive and keep the organization’s template deck and 2) have that deck open at all times when building new slides (which you’ll know is cumbersome if you’ve ever had to do it).
To use PowerTools’ custom slide library feature, you will be prompted to select your PowerPoint template file as a reference. Once selected, all its slides will be available to add easily from the PowerTools ribbon. You can even add new slides to that template deck from the deck you are currently working on (without even having to open the template file). This may seem like a small convenience, but being able to add template slides without having to open another file is a game changer. It’s just the right amount of convenience to get users to leverage their templates.
PowerTools’ enterprise licenses can also come imbedded with your organization’s template slides instead of the add-in’s default slide library. You just have to let the support team know which deck to use, and they’ll adapt the add-in for your organization.
Aligning Existing Presentations to the Template
Most organizations have decks they reuse frequently, and you’ll want to align those with the style of your organization’s template.
- Using the Slide Master: Aligning existing decks is easy if all slides were built perfectly using master colors and elements. If so, you can align your slides to your new master by going to the Home tab and selecting Layout. There, you can select which slide of your master you want the current slide to be aligned to. However, decks are often not made using master colors and fonts. At least 99% of the time, you’ll need to change all colors and fonts manually, which involves clicking on every shape individually, slide by slide.
- Bulk Formatting Features: If manual alignment doesn’t sound worth your time, you’ll want bulk formatting features. PowerTools’ Recolor and Replace Font features allow document-wide formatting changes without having to click on each slide individually. These tools will save you tons of time by recognizing every font and color throughout your deck changing them all at the click of a button.
By implementing these tools, you can ensure consistency throughout your organization’s PowerPoint decks, reinforcing your brand and saving everyone valuable time.
