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. 

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: 

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.