I
IanW
I have been struggling with understanding the logic that applies to the
"footer" of a slide and the layouts. It seems insanely complicated, but
perhaps someone can explain it for me.
At the root of it seems to be that if you or anyone edits, moves, or touches
an element that arose from a template, then it loses all association with the
template thereby making it extremely difficult to create a template that will
allow a range of users to create consistent looking presentations, and to
facilitate future updates to slide formatting etc.
Consider this simple example:
- Create blank new 3-slide presentation with a title page, a title+content
page and a "two content" page using the Layout drop-down on the Home tab.
- In the Insert Tab, click Header&Footer, check only the Page and Footer
boxes. Type a word in the Footer text box, click "Apply to All". So far so
good.
- Now lets say we want all our "Two Content" slides to have the date,footer,
and page fields much lower because those pages run out of vertical space too
often. Go to Master View, and reposition the 3 fields a bit lower just for
that layout. (Noting the tooltip on the layout thumbnail that confirms this
layout is being used by slide #3, for example.)
- Now close Master view and return to Normal. Strangely, page 3 still has
the footer and page number in the same old place (and presumably the same
would apply to the date), and was unaffected by this change to the layout.
- To be even more thorough, I save this file as a .pptx and also as a .potx.
Then I re-load the .pptx and explicitly apply the theme found in the .potx.
That should apply the changes to that layout. But no, the new definition of
my Two-Content Layout with the lower footer is not applied to the slides in
the presentation that are based on that Layout.
What is going on here?
Thanks for following me this far! It seems like a fundamental question to
the whole idea of templates and layouts.
--Ian
"footer" of a slide and the layouts. It seems insanely complicated, but
perhaps someone can explain it for me.
At the root of it seems to be that if you or anyone edits, moves, or touches
an element that arose from a template, then it loses all association with the
template thereby making it extremely difficult to create a template that will
allow a range of users to create consistent looking presentations, and to
facilitate future updates to slide formatting etc.
Consider this simple example:
- Create blank new 3-slide presentation with a title page, a title+content
page and a "two content" page using the Layout drop-down on the Home tab.
- In the Insert Tab, click Header&Footer, check only the Page and Footer
boxes. Type a word in the Footer text box, click "Apply to All". So far so
good.
- Now lets say we want all our "Two Content" slides to have the date,footer,
and page fields much lower because those pages run out of vertical space too
often. Go to Master View, and reposition the 3 fields a bit lower just for
that layout. (Noting the tooltip on the layout thumbnail that confirms this
layout is being used by slide #3, for example.)
- Now close Master view and return to Normal. Strangely, page 3 still has
the footer and page number in the same old place (and presumably the same
would apply to the date), and was unaffected by this change to the layout.
- To be even more thorough, I save this file as a .pptx and also as a .potx.
Then I re-load the .pptx and explicitly apply the theme found in the .potx.
That should apply the changes to that layout. But no, the new definition of
my Two-Content Layout with the lower footer is not applied to the slides in
the presentation that are based on that Layout.
What is going on here?
Thanks for following me this far! It seems like a fundamental question to
the whole idea of templates and layouts.
--Ian
