Can you apply a layout that has multiple body text boxes?

[New Daddy]

Attached is one of many useful layouts that I found from my company's template archive.

I think it's a perfect layout for a slide with 4 bullet points (with sub-bullet points under each bullet point). But I can't seem to apply this to an existing slide with 4 bulleted topics.

Instead, the 4 bulleted topics go into the body text place holder of this layout.

It looks like the only way to enter text into a layout like this is to start from this slide and hard-enter the text. That is not consistent with my workflow, as I start from a Word outline, export it to Powerpoint, and apply most appropriate layout to each slide depending on the context.

Any solution for my needs?

[HansV]

The text boxes in that slide aren't placeholders, as in a slide master. The text in each of the boxes has to be replaced with the text you want, and the boxes numbered 1 to 4 are not equivalent to bullet points. They are like small subslides, each with a title and body text.

It might be possible to create a macro to copy the slide and populate it from a Word document, but (a) I cannot help you with that, and (b) it seems more work than it's worth.

[Rudi]

Its not the solution you are after as you'd somehow need to link the placeholders together to allow you to type into them as one big placeholder instead of 4 small ones, but this is the closest you can get to adding text without having to clear out text beforehand. I added the 4 box design to a new master layout and added placeholders into the boxes in order to accept text or images etc...

Sample.pptx