Modus operandi of Powerpoint?

[New Daddy]

I'm waking up to the cruel reality of building PowerPoint slides.

It looks like most of the mechanics of PowerPoint are suited for the kind of workflow where you start working with slides right off the bat -- as opposed to building the text first either from within PowerPoint or from a word processor. Many of the beautiful layouts that I've found have independent text boxes that cannot be applied to an existing slide and reset for instant adaptation.

To me, this is NOT an efficient design. If you spend time in designing a beautiful new layout, wouldn't you want to be able to apply that layout to many existing and new slides simply by applying it as a master slide?

Being a PowerPoint novice, I'm just realizing this stupidity now, but the point must have been raised so many times over the years. Hasn't this limitation bothered users?

[HansV]

I agree that it's inconvenient, but I haven't seen many complaints about it.

[Rudi]

Our company has undergone a reformatting of our brand; and hence our corporate colours and documentation design has changed. Our marketing department has designers that do all the changes but those who worked on PPT (IMHO) did not understand PPT and master slides as their designs for the new branding were done on standard slides and saved as templates. Now we have users who are trying to import existing PPT's into the new branding template but it does not combine as it simply brings the old slides into the template as new masters. IOW, one cannot import the slides and "reset" them to take on the new designs. Furthermore, many of the existing PPT's were not created with the proper process of using masters, but people have this bad habit of inserting their own text boxes into blank slides...and this of course does not allow for resetting either with new masters. Argh....it makes things VERY messy!

I can understand that its good to have flexibility in making slides and having PPT work easy for everyone, but in a corporate environment or for proper large presentation purposes users must understand that correct design using master slides is imperative.

I understand your frustrations New Daddy, but I do also understand the need to have PPT user friendly and flexible.

[HansV]

In that way, it is like Word: most users do not use styles in Word, but apply direct formatting. So if the 'House Style' changes, you have to reformat the entire document from scratch...