Finetuning your templates

A good template includes an Office theme: fonts for heading and body, and theme colors based on your brand.
These are defined in the master, and should not have the default name 'Office theme'.

The master sets default size and location for placeholders and fixed elements like the logo.
We can make sure that when you use your mouse wheel to scroll, you do not move directly to the next slide. By default this happens more quickly than you would like.
If you click the PowerPoint 'Reset' button, problems should be solved, not created!
The template should offer a sufficient number of slide layouts. In most cases you want to have placeholders as a starting point instead of an empty canvas. Every now and then you will need to create a slide based on the 'Blank' layout, but this should not be the norm.
By the way: when using KeySlides, you don't need to include every layout in the template. You can add specific layouts in the example slide files. This way, you keep the size of your template reasonable, and have the advantages of slide layouts.

Often, it helps to critically review the slide layouts. Is everything (still) neatly aligned?
If you don't want to include date, footer and/or slide number, it's better to move the placeholders off the slide canvas than to delete them.
This prevents issues when you apply the slide layout to an existing slide.

Multi level bullet lists should align properly and use the correct bullet character. PowerPoint supports up to nine levels. In most cases, a smaller number of levels is defined, which leads to unexpected results if the user selects an undefined level. We solve this in your template!

Adding slide layouts, but certainly including static photos in slide layouts will grow your template to an unusable size.
Often we can reduce the file size by cropping photos and compressing images. Also, slide layouts with images can often be moved to example slide files. This reduces the size of the template. Your presentation will grow only if you add a slide based on that layout.

An Office theme has six accent colors. (Unfortunately), PowerPoint creates shades of these colors that you cannot control.
But we dan define up to fifty ' Custom colors' to the palette, so users have easy access to the brand colors and shades. See also Charts.

When you insert a table, often it has a dark shade for the first row and two lighter shades of that color for the following even and odd rows.
We can add one or more table styles to the template and setting one of these as the default for new tables.
A table style offers more control over the table format, resulting in a more professional look and feel.

Many templates include layouts that have a logo on a photo. Often the logo is placed in a such a way that it can be moved or changed by the user.
Depending on your logo, it is often possible to 'punch a logo sized hole' in the picture placeholder for the photo. Then, the logo can be included as a static image on the slide layout, and the user cannot change it.