Reuse content by creating templates

- [Instructor] Hi I'm Derek Chow and this week we're continuing to look at ways to reuse content and design elements to save time and to help you bring a consistent look to your presentations. When you've created presentation you can save a copy of it as a PowerPoint template, letting you reuse the same look and feel on other presentations or you can share it with colleagues so they can use your template for their own presentations. In order to create a custom template first make sure the presentation is set up with the fonts, colors, and other design elements that you want to have present in that template. For example, previously we looked at how to edit slide masters and to review, you just come up to the View menu, and here click Slide Master, and then you can modify and edit the slide master to customize the look and feel of your presentation.

For example, I'll just select this title text. I'll come over to the Home tab and just make it bold and italicized, but you can spend a lot of time in here really creating a custom look by doing things like changing a theme or the background style. Or you can select one of the slide layouts under the master and then come up to the Slide Master tab and choose to Insert Placeholders for different types of content. For example, I could add a chart here. And when you're done you can come back to the Slide Master tab and close the Master View. And once you've set up your presentation the way you want, to save it as a template go to the File tab.

Click Save As. Click Browse. And under the Save As Type menu choose PowerPoint template. Notice that automatically switches our location to the Custom Office Templates folder. That's the default location and that's where you should save your custom templates. If necessary, you can change the file name. I'll just change this to Red30 template and I'll click Save. To use your new custom template, go to File, New.

Here you can click the Custom heading that will now appear here. I'll go into Custom Office Templates and here's the template we just created. I'll double click that to create a new presentation based on it and you can see that opens it up and we can now start building a new presentation from this custom template. Now if you ever want to share that template with others, just navigate into your Users folder, into your Account folder. Go into Documents and this is where you'll find the Custom Office Templates folder.

And you can see here's our template and you can just drag that to a portable storage device or even email it to somebody else so they can import it into their copy of PowerPoint. Alright, so that's how to save a custom template in PowerPoint. I'm Derek Chow and we'll see you next time for more PowerPoint Tips.