How To Apply A Template To An Existing Powerpoint Presentation

How to Use PowerPoint Chart Templates to Speed Up Formatting Your Information

PowerPoint's Format Painter can save y'all countless hours with shapes and text boxes, but it doesn't work on charts. There is, however, a method to save and paste design formatting from one chart to another. So, let's swoop into the mysterious globe of Chart Templates and .crtx files.

Nosotros'll outset with data sets for the highest paid athletes in 2018 and 2017 and a default chart mode (click the images beneath for a closer look).

At present let'due south customize the design on the 2018 chart including changes to the nautical chart type (from columns to bars), colors, fonts, tick marks, filigree lines, even custom numbering format for the axis and physical placement of the chart title.

More afterwards the bound! Keep reading below ↓
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One time we're happy with all of our manual formatting and design edits, we'll select the chart and right-click which gives us an choice to "Save as Template" which nosotros'll practise and name AthletesHighestPaid_Bar.crtx. Note that as tempted as you might be to save this .crtx somewhere more convenient, y'all must save information technology in this default folder in order for this all to work.

To apply this saved style to the 2017 nautical chart, all you need to do is select the target chart, select from the Nautical chart Design tab, Modify Chart Type: Templates: Athletes_BarChart.crtx. And voila!

If you have a deck with dozens of like charts, you can easily run into the fourth dimension savings Chart Templates tin can provide.

Differences on the PC

In this example, I used a Mac, but functionality on the PC is essentially the same except that the Alter Nautical chart Type dialog includes thumbnail images of your saved templates. Merely be forewarned: These thumbnails are not the most detailed or accurate, as you tin see below, then exist detailed when naming them.

Accessing Your .crtx Files

If you want to access the .crtx files straight and provide them to a client, for example, y'all can select "Manage Templates" from the bottom of the Modify Chart Type pull down to be taken directly to the folder locations.

And here are the direct paths:

Mac: User: Library: Grouping Containers: UBF8T346G9.Office: User Content: Nautical chart Templates…
PC: C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates\Charts

Tips & Cautions

While PowerPoint saves all previous Chart Templates, I usually create new ones on an as-needed and per-deck ground. And if you take numerous charts beyond multiple slides, I would propose using layouts with chart or content placeholders to ensure consistency and alignment.

Chart Templates come with a few limiting caveats, the biggest one being that these .crtx files live locally on your calculator just and exercise non travel with the file the style that masters and color palettes practise. This ways they can be hard for others to use or to apply as part of an overall PowerPoint template. Yous tin can locate and ship your .crtx files to another user or an IT section to have them placed in the appropriate local folders (see above), but this is obviously a challenging workflow.

Also remember that a Chart Template includes the type of nautical chart itself, so if you apply a bar chart template to an unformatted line chart, yous will get a new bar chart. This may or may not make sense for your data, so y'all may need to create a different nautical chart template for each blazon of chart you lot want to pick up formatting from.

And that reminds me, considering of the saved auto-calculated centrality, our two charts don't really concur to the best practise of matching scales. I'll just get in and manually set up the 2017 axis to lucifer that of 2018. Done!

What Most Tables?

Sadly, there is no choice to save and apply a table template, but the YouTools suite of tools from YouPresent includes a magical format painter for tables. And it works on both Mac and PC!