According to a 2020 research done by Empower®, more than a third of the time people spend in the MS Office apps is wasted on formatting tasks. A stunning 52% of that formatting is dedicated to corporate design compliance. And yes, you rightly assume that PowerPoint formatting holds the biggest share here.
Thankfully, organisations can create their own templates in PowerPoint and thus raise their productivity, which means spending less time on repetitive and tedious tasks like formatting. We know the topic is important for any business professional, that’s why last year we had visual comms expert and PowerPoint MVP Troy Chollar join us at the Present to Succeed conference and share his pro tips on boosting your PowerPoint productivity by using the template to the fullest.
Here’s a few of Troy’s 9 business template tips that help you build on-brand presentations faster.
Preset template theme colours
This awesome option is helpful if you’re using a template for your PPT presentation but are struggling with the custom theme colours. Imagine you have this cool template, but you need to change the accent colour to comply with some new company guidelines. In most cases you’d probably use the Eyedropper tool to pinpoint the colour that you need, but you’d have to go and change that color slide by slide. So, Troy says, it’s safer to work on theme-colour level and pre-define the desired accent colour of your template by inserting its RGB or HEX value from the Custom Colour pane.
Once done, the new accent colour is applied to all objects which are using it across the entire presentation. This way, you just save yourself a lot of time and ensure that this new shade of blue is the same shade of blue everywhere.
Preset template theme colours
Try to make a habit of using PowerPoint placeholders, as they help you build consistent slides across the whole presentation. Of course, this means that you’ll need to have defined what types of content you’ll be dealing with (text, images or tables) and then purposefully determine the placeholders on each slide.
Troy advises using placeholders and master layouts anytime you can, even though you need to have your content on the slide in order to be able to make layout changes. But what happens if you decide to change the font or the alignment and soon realise it should be reversed?

You can easily go back to the preset master slide by selecting the placeholders you wish to format and click the Reset button. It’s going to update the slide to all the pre-configured placeholders. Effortless!
Bonus: Watch the full session to hear Troy talk about leveraging picture placeholders (and to get the full range of his tips on amplifying your business templates). Here’s a tiny teaser concerning ghost animations:

Background fill
Let’s us share one last tip from Troy’s talk. It’s about using shapes to mask out objects on your template which can be super handy if you, for example, want to show a break in the axis line of a chart or create “animation” effect on a table. Yes, even that! While you can insert a shape to cover up any element on a slide, this doesn’t work quite well when you have a multicolour or textured background. To solve this Troy suggests a less-known, albeit long-existing option – background fill.
Insert the shape, open the Format Shape pane and click Slide background fill. The shape will automatically blend with the background colour of your slide, and you won’t have to worry about visible outlines or inconsistent colours. Wherever you move or place the shape, it will have the template background as its own. Note that the background should be an embedded image for the tip to be utilised. Watch the video to see how the magic happens.

We hope we teased your appetite for more business template tools. There’s plenty more on our blog. And if this is not enough, you can grab your ticket to the upcoming Present to Succeed conference where more presentation experts like Troy Chollar will gather to share the latest tools and best techniques for making outstanding presentations.
There’s a lot to learn from all the speakers on the Tools panel at Present to Succeed, so why not consider getting the whole track recordings?
Join Present to Succeed - the biggest presentation skills conference in the world
Whether you are part of an organization or running a business, how your slides look will always factor in your success. Learn how to become an influential speaker by joining our 20+ industry-leading speakers’ sessions.
Start engaging your audience better and influencing them to embrace your concepts, hire you, or buy your products. Now is the best moment to get your ticket!
Join Present to Succeed - the biggest presentation skills conference in the world
Whether you are part of an organisation or running a business, how your slides look will always factor in your success. Learn how to become an influential speaker by joining our 20+ industry-leading speakers’ sessions.
Start engaging your audience better and learn how to influence them to embrace your concepts, hire you, or buy your products. Get your ticket now!