Saving a Custom Design Template

Suppose you have spent a lot of time customizing the masters of a particular presentation and you think you might want to use the new design for future presentations. Or suppose your company wants to require that all official presentations use a customized set of masters that include a logo, contact information, a specific background, and bullets and text in colors that reflect the company's branding. In cases like these, you can save a customized presentation as a design template. You can then use it as the basis for new presentations by selecting it from the My Templates folder that is available in the New Presentation window.

In this exercise, you will save a presentation as a design template and then create a new presentation based on the template.

1.	Click the Microsoft Office Button, and then click Save As. Microsoft Office Button The Save As dialog box appears.
2.	In the File name box, type My Template.
3.	Click the Save as type arrow, and then in the list, click PowerPoint Template. PowerPoint displays your default Templates folder. Important For a template to be available directly in the New Presentation window, it must be stored in the default Templates folder. If you store a template in a different folder, you can browse to that folder and double-click the template file to start PowerPoint and open a new presentation based on the template.
4.	Click Save. PowerPoint saves the template in the specified folder. You can now edit the template and save it as you would any other presentation.
5.	On the Slides tab in the Overview pane, click Slide 2. Then scroll the pane until you can see the last slide in the presentation, hold down the key, and click Slide 16. Slides 2 through 16 are selected.
6.	Press . The template now contains only the title slide.
7.	In the Slide pane, select the title and delete it. Then select the text in the subtitle placeholder, delete it, and click away from the placeholder. The title slide now contains two placeholders that are empty except for placeholder instructions.
8.	On the Quick Access Toolbar, click the Save button, and then close the template. Save
9.	Click the Microsoft Office Button, and then click New.
10.	In the New Presentation window, click My templates. The New Presentation dialog box opens. [View full size image]
11.	On the My Templates tab, double-click My Template. PowerPoint opens a new presentation based on your custom template.
12.	On the Home tab, in the Slides group, click the New Slide arrow, and then in the Slide gallery, click any slide layout.
13.	Continue adding slides of different layouts to the presentation to see their effects.