Powerpoint Template

Introduction

The idea of a powerpoint template is to help speed up the process of slide making, make it a little easier to navigate and at the same time to ensure that the quality of output improves. When empowered with a good template, high quality decks which usually take hours to make should be completed within 30 minutes of quick, smart editing. To this end, it is useful to understand firstly, how to use a template, and then how to make a template which is best suited to one's personal needs.

Using a Powerpoint Template

To begin with, the the required template and corresponding theme need to be made available on your system. The .thmx & .potx files required can be found in the following google drive folder:
template files
1. Store the .thmx file in "C:\Users\<user name>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates\Document Themes".
2. Store the .potx file in "C:\Users\<user name>\OneDrive\Documents\Custom Office Templates".
3. Now, when you open PowerPoint, you should be able to see and use the theme by "Design -> Dropdown button -> Custom -> Indigo Dye - Garamond 1 - Public Use". Selecting this will change the colours available in all colour selection dropdowns, and also the set of slide layouts available while creating a new slide.
4. To create a new deck with the PowerPoint template (recommended for all new ppts) one has to navigate to "File -> New -> Custom -> Custom Office Templates -> Starter Deck -> Create". This will create a new ppt with the default slides of the PowerPoint template (.potx) just loaded.

Alternately, you could just download the .pptx file from the google drive folder and use that as a starting point for each new ppt.

Creating ppts with the Template

Creating impactful presentations quickly with a template takes a little time and effort to learn initially. The recommended steps to follow are:
1. Go through the entire template. There are about 70 slides of the template. Some of these slides are instructional, explaining the principles of the template, the range of objects and layouts available, and how best to use them. Other slides are the objects and layouts themselves, which can be copy-pasted for quick and easy use.
2. Familiarise yourself with the objects, slides and principles of the template. It would be useful to be familiar with which objects are where, and how one could use each of them. It may be particularly useful to register the names of each object so that one could quickly search for it within the ppt and re-use.
3. Look at a few other ppts made using the template. In order to get a better idea of how you might want to use the template it might help to have a look at a few other ppts made out of the same template and either re-use ideas or improve upon the same.
template sample ppts
4. Make your own ppts using the template. And finally, making a bunch of ppts by re-using the template and building upon it is the best way to get comfortable with it. By creating a few ppts one can develop an idea of what shortcomings of the template they would want to improve upon and build their own template as well.

Creating a Powerpoint Template

With an understanding of what a powerpoint template can be used for and how to use one, it now makes sense to move forward to creating one. There are a few simple steps to creating a powerpoint template. I will gloss over a lot of them, as they're essentially hinged on the idea of understanding what one wants out of their template and the ability to make quality ppts.
1. Set colours and fonts as per requirements.
2. Identify images/backgrounds objects to use and create them as images (outside of the ppt).
3. Use slide master view to create each slide type for the layout (with needed objects and images created).
4. Save the .thmx (save as "Office Theme") to "C:\Users\<user name>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates\Document Themes".
5. Identify main types of slides to use and other elements and objects that will be used frequently. Create all of these objects and stadard slides in a ppt. Detail out any important rules of usage to create on comprehensive ppt which can be quickly cut down and edited.
6. Save the .potx version of the file (save as "PowerPoint Template") in "C:\Users\<user name>\OneDrive\Documents\Custom Office Templates".
7. Create new files from that template through "File -> New -> Custom -> Custom Office Templates -> <template name> -> Create".