Converting your slides in a new template with Slide Converter

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Written by Romain | Updated

Slide Converter helps you work around one of the main limitations of PowerPoint: converting your slides to a new template.

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:

  1. Select the slides you want to migrate in the thumbnail pane on the left.
  2. 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.
  3. In the Slide Converter pane, select the presentation where you want to migrate the slides.
  4. Slide Converter will run the conversion and open the selected presentation with the converted slides.
  5. 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.
  6. Just close the pane when you have satisfied with the conversion.

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.

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:

  1. Click Layouts Adjustments to display the list of the layouts used in the source and the destination presentations.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.