Slide Converter helps to convert slides and whole presentations from one brand to another. It's more comprehensive than the native process and much faster than adjusting each element manually because Slide Converter can process multiple slides at once.
Tip
If you are not familiar with the concept of Placeholders, Slide Layouts and Slide Master in PowerPoint, we would suggest having a look at the
Microsoft website and our
support page first before to get a better understanding of this article.
When to use Slide Converter
Our Slide Converter is designed for two main scenarios:
- Converting a deck to an UpSlide compatible, automated template (either same or different brand).
- Convert slides to a different branded template (often client formatted)
We’ve designed it to work better than using native PowerPoint copy and paste. For example when converting a 4:3 ratio slide to a 16:9 template Slide Converter:
- Preserves the aspect ratio of images some shapes that should not be distorted. Specifically: circles, squares and shape groups.
- Intelligently adapts others shapes by adjusting the width and height to match the new slide size.
How to use Slide Converter
Convert to an UpSlide compatible, automated template
- Select the slides you want to migrate in the PowerPoint thumbnail pane on the left.
- Go to the UpSlide tab, click Slide Converter and choose the template you want to convert to.
- Once the conversion is done, a success pane shows in the destination presentation so you can see the initial results.
- Optional: If you would like to do some adjustments to the conversion click Conversion Tools within the pane. This allows to change the colors and the layout type in the destination presentation (you might need to check the Layout Adjustments and the colors, see our dedicated paragraph below).
- Close the pane when you are satisfied with the conversion. Your slides are ready to use.
Convert to a different branded template
- Select the slides you want to migrate in the PowerPoint thumbnail pane on the left.
- Go to UpSlide tab, click on Slide Converter and then convert to another presentation.
- This will open the Slide Converter pane on the right-hand side and show all open PowerPoint documents you can convert into. Select your template you want them to be converted into.
- Optional: If you would like to do some adjustments to the conversion click Conversion Tools within the pane. This allows to change the colors and the layout type in the destination presentation (you might need to check the Layout Adjustments and the colors, see our dedicated paragraph below).
- Close the pane when you are satisfied with the conversion. Your slides are ready to use.
About Layouts Adjustments
For each slide converted, Slide Converter tries to match the slide layout of the source with a layout of the destination presentation.
The Slide Converter automatically matches the source and destination layouts based on their structure. Sometimes it might be unable to find the perfect match and it will use an incorrect layout. In that case, you can adjust the layout in the Conversion tools pane after the conversion:
- Click Layouts to display the list of the layouts used in the source and the destination presentations.
- Thumbnails on the right of the pane correspond to the layouts of the destination presentation chosen by default by Slide Converter. To change a layout, click on it and choose which layout fits best the original layout.
- Click on Apply to see the results in your presentation. Once the layout adjustment happens, the change will apply to all the slides with the same layout. The conversion pane remains open during this process. The layout adjustment can be used several times if needed and will be saved for the next time.
- Once you are happy with your choices the conversion pane can be closed.
About Color Adjustments
Sometimes you would like to have specific colors for fonts or shapes. With the color tab you can choose the color you want to apply as filling, outline or font color.
- Click Colors to display and choose the color you would like to change for fill, outline or font.
- You can apply these changes either to the selection or to your whole presentation.
- Click on Apply to implement these changes in your presentation.
Slide Converter options
The options for slide converter can be accessed in two different ways.
- Click Settings on the UpSlide toolbar and navigate to Slide Converter
- Open Slide Converter and click on Options
Within the window, the user can adjust three properties.
- When Convert Theme Colors is activated the fill, font and outline color in the source presentation theme is replaced by the color with the same position in the native color picker in the destination theme.
- When Convert Fonts is activated the fonts which do not exist in the destination presentation will be replaced by the default font of the destination presentation.
- When Reset Footers is activated the footers of the destination presentation will be used.
Transferring old section dividers and agenda pages
If the original presentation contains sections, subsections, or a table of contents not created with UpSlide:
- Delete the slides that converted over (they are not automated).
- Recreate them using the automation engine of UpSlide using. the Insert button in the Table of Contents part of the UpSlide tab (more details here).
Slide Converter helps you work around a limitation of PowerPoint: converting existing slides to a new template (slide master). Or combining slides from multiple templates into one so they have a consistent look and feel.
Main pains when copying and pasting slides
Copying and pasting slides from one presentation to another may be highly unsatisfying if they do not use the same template/Slide Master (different slide size, layouts, color theme, ...). To fix the issues due to the copy and paste, you might need to manually:
- Change the layouts of the pasted slides.
- Remove the Slide Master and Layouts created by the copy and paste.
- Enable/Disable/Reinsert the footers, and adjust their position and formatting.
- Make sure that the pasted slides use available placeholders instead of text boxes.
- Adjust the colors that depend on the color palette if the Theme Colors are different.
- Resize all shapes manually if the slide size changes (e.g. from 4:3 to 16:9).
- Ensure that the UpSlide Table of Content, Divider Slides and reminder shapes are still working.
For these reasons, if you ever need to convert slides to a new template, using Slide Converter might be your best solution as they can perform the actions below automatically.
Tip
If you are not familiar with the concept of Placeholders, Slide Layouts and Slide Master in PowerPoint, we would suggest to have a look at the
Microsoft website first before to get a better understanding of this article.
How to use Slide Converter
To migrate slides to another presentation:
- Select the slides you want to migrate in the thumbnail pane on the left.
- Go to the UpSlide tab, click Templates to open the drop-down menu and select Slide Converter. This will open the Slide Converter pane on the right-hand side.
- In the Slide Converter pane, select the presentation (a clean UpSlide template) where you want to migrate the slides.
- Slide Converter will run the conversion and open the selected presentation with the converted slides.
- You can adjust the options in the Slide Converter pane (you might need to check the Layout Adjustments in particular, see our dedicated paragraph below) and click Apply to run the conversion again. Read our next paragraph for more details about the different options available.
- Just close the pane when you have satisfied with the conversion.
Transferring old section dividers and agenda pages
If the original presentation contains sections, subsections, or a table of contents not created with UpSlide:
- Delete the slides that converted over (they are not automated).
- Recreate them using the automation engine of UpSlide using the Insert button in the Table of Contents part of the UpSlide tab (more details here).
If the original presentation was not built correctly (not using placeholders, colors not related to the palette, etc.) then you should check the converted slides for:
- Font types, colors, and sizes
- Footers
- Position of text boxes
More details about Slide Converter
Main actions performed
Some of these options can be deactivated in the options of the Slide Converter pane. All manual adjustments are saved and will be proposed by default for the next migration.
- Delete footers in the source presentation as they can be completely distorted when copying the slides (tick Reset Footer option).
- Unlink colors from the color scheme to preserve them after copy/paste (tick Freeze Colors option).
- Apply layout adjustments using correspondence table (see dedicated paragraph below).
- Remove masters and layouts that would potentially be created with a normal copy and paste.
- Adjust font size to the new page size as PowerPoint can fail to do it automatically.
- Adjust shape position and size, if page size differs between source and destination. This will preserve the general aspect of the slide (see dedicated paragraph below).
- Convert shape fonts if slide master default font differs between source and destination (tick Convert Fonts option). In this case, all fonts that do not exist in the destination presentation will be replaced by the default font.
- Reinsert footers, which gives the same result as clicking Insert > Headers & Footers (tick Reset Footer option).
- Fill empty placeholders with corresponding shape content. A shape matches a placeholder if its area is +/-60% of the placeholder's area, and it overlaps more than 60% of the placeholder (tick Auto-Fill placeholders option).
- Reposition placeholders converted to shapes when the destination layout contains less placeholders than the source layout.
- Adapt Table of Contents elements (Table of Contents, Divider Slides, reminder shapes) to the destination presentation format.
You can change some settings after following the steps above. If you change a setting press Apply again to re-run Slide Converter with your new settings.
About Layouts Adjustments
For each slide converted, Slide Converter tries to match the slide layout of the source with a layout of the destination presentation.
However, if the source and the destination layouts names differ significantly, Slide Converter might not be able to find the correct layout. In that case, you can adjust the layout manually in the options of the Slide Converter pane after the conversion:
- Click Layouts Adjustments to display the list of the layouts used in the source and the destination presentations.
- Thumbnails on the right of the pane correspond to the layouts of the destination presentation chosen by default by Slide Converter. To change a layout, just click on it and choose which layout fits best the original layout.
- Once you are happy with your choices click Apply to run the conversion again.
About slide size change
When the slide size changes between source and destination, PowerPoint will by default resize each shape to fit the new slide size while preserving width/height ratio. For instance, going from a 4:3 to 16:9 format reduces all shape heights proportionally (by 25%) and adjusts the width in consequence.
This can be desirable in some situations (e.g. when the slides contain images that cannot be distorted), but the slides overall will lose their general aspect and look a bit empty.
When the slide size changes, Slide Converter acts differently as it divides the shapes in two categories and apply a different transformation to each:
- For images and other shapes that cannot be distorted (namely: circles, squares and shape groups), Slide Converter keeps PowerPoint default behavior and locks the aspect ratio.
- For all the others shapes, Slide Converter changes both the width and height to match the new slide size.
