Table of Contents automation - Section

This article will guide you through modifying your section divider slides and settings. If you're not familiar with UpSlide's PowerPoint automation, you might want to look at our Getting started article.

The section divider helps structure presentations. In the introduction, we mentioned the differences between Light and Standard templates. The Light template only displays information about the current section. The Standard template can display information about other sections, corresponding subsections, and slide titles.

In this article, we will build the following section dividers as examples.

Presentation layout

Go to the Slide Master to make sure you have a layout to use as a section divider. In this layout, you don’t need to have any title or footer placeholders. The only shapes you need are the ones you will use for decoration.

In our example, the presentation layout looks the same whether we’re building for the Light or the Standard template.

Options

In the UpSlide ribbon, go to the References section and click Options, then Section Divider. Here, you will set up all the automation parameters related to the section divider slide.

Layout

Click the Layout box to select the layout that should be used as a section divider. Once the layout is selected, its name will appear when you hover on the box.

You can input a title in Section divider title if all your section dividers should have the same title. If you do, check Title in your presentation layout in the Slide Master to add a title placeholder. Otherwise, leave it blank. Below is an example of what a divider might look like if we put a title placeholder in our presentation layout and “Section Divider” as our Section divider title.

Content

The options available in Content will differ based on whether you have selected a Light or a Standard template at the start.

Light template

With a Light template, your section dividers can only contain 3 shapes. They will be set by default:

Shape 1 with variable <%SectionNum%> to display the section number.
Shape 2 with variable <%SectionName%> to display the section title.
Shape 3 is disabled by default. You can choose to put the section number again in Shape 3 if your layout requires it to appear in 2 separate places for design purposes.

If you’d like to know all the variables you can use in this section, you can find the summary table in the reminder article.

Standard template

A Standard template gives you additional options. You can display in the section divider:

The other sections of your presentation, appendix section titles and unnumbered section titles.
The current section’s subsection titles and other subsection titles.
The current section’s slide titles.

For the current section subsection titles and slide titles, you can select the option Yes, but can be deactivated. This means that the final user can decide when creating a presentation if they would like them to show or not, depending on the length of the presentation.

Note:

If, as you build your presentation, you add more sections and subsections to the point where there isn’t enough space on the section divider to display all the titles, the section divider will automatically switch to displaying only the current section title.

Automation layout

Once you’ve selected all the options for your section divider, you can go through the automation slide to place the different elements you’ve chosen to display.

In the Slide Master, select the second slide of the second section. It should be called Section Divider Storage Layout. Delete the grey box to display the automation elements. As for the Agenda, it is recommended to open the Selection Pane in the Home tab to have a better view of all the elements.

Light template

Below is the list of all the placeholders in the Section Divider Storage Layout if you use the Light template:

Section Index Box: contains the information for Shape 1. If you haven’t changed its value, it will be the number or letter used to identify the section.
Section Title Box: contains the information for Shape 2. If you haven’t changed its value, it will be the section’s title.
Section Page Box: contains the information for Shape 3. If you’ve selected to put another value here, it will be displayed there.

To customize this layout, move the shapes you’ve chosen to display to the right spot in your slide and update the font for each shape.

If you’re not using Shape 3, you can push the placeholder Section Page Box to the side.

Standard template

Below is the list of all the placeholders in the Section Divider Storage Layout if you use the Standard template:

Section Index Box: contains the number or letter used to identify the section.
Section Title Box: contains the section’s title.
Section Page Box: contains the section’s divider slide number.
Subsection Index Box: contains the number or letter used to identify the subsection if you’ve selected to display subsections in the Options.
Subsection Title Box: contains the subsection’s title if you’ve selected to display subsections in the Options.
Subsection Page Box: contains the subsection’s divider slide number if you’ve selected to display subsections in the Options.
Slide Title Box: contains the slide’s title if you’ve selected to display slide titles in the Options.
Slide Page Box: contains the slide’s number if you’ve selected to display slide titles in the Options.
Plot Area: defines the space in which the titles will be inserted. If there are too many titles to fit in the placeholder, the section divider will switch to only displaying the current section.

Customize the Standard template automation layout

To customize the layout, move the Plot Area to define where the titles should be displayed. Don’t make the shape too small, or your titles won’t fit. All elements displayed in your section dividers should fit inside the Plot Area.

To ensure titles display properly when several elements are displayed on the section divider, UpSlide automatically aligns titles, numbers and slide numbers of the same element (section, subsection or slide).

We recommend making the titles, numbers and slide numbers placeholders the same height and aligning the shape at the bottom before updating the font. If you would like elements to be displayed outside of the plot area, you need to offset them with margins.

In our example, we placed the Section Index Box and the Section Title Box so the placeholders fit inside the Plot Area. Then we updated the font colour and size to fit our template.

For the section number to appear outside of our Plot Area, we set the placeholder in the Plot Area, aligned with the Section Title Box. Then, using PowerPoint’s margin in the Format Shape’s Text Options we increased the Left and Top margins.

This technique wouldn’t work if we displayed other sections in our section divider.

If you’ve chosen to display subsection titles in your section divider, place the Subsection Index Box, the Subsection Title Box and the Subsection Page Box so the placeholders fit inside the Plot Area.

As for the section placeholders, make the Subsection Index Box, the Subsection Title Box and the Subsection Page Box placeholders the same height and aligning the shape at the bottom.

You can then format the font of your subsection elements to fit your template and use margins to handle positioning as we did for the section number above.

This is what our Standard template automation slide looks like after placing all the placeholders