Well, the text certainly needs to be in powerpoint for them to edit, but if graphics or the overall look of slides don't need to be edited, yes, they could be designed in another program such as InDesgin, Illustrator, heck Photoshop …whatever and placed into powerpoint (re-formatted as a powerpoint friendly format of course.)

Power Point and Publisher may be harmful to your health.

We routinely develop materials for PowerPoint, its one way we control the brand message. Once you have the slide measurements you can go to town in any software you want. Newer versions of PowerPoint accept eps and PDF files as well as PNG, so you're not limited to JPEGs and TIFFs.

And do yourself a favor, learn how to use master slides in PPT

Agreed. I suggest making an "Official Standards" PPT template. Make some sample slides which show which fonts and sizes/headlines/bolds/etc. you want people to use. You can even dictate which photo frames/sizes/layouts they are 'allowed' to use - and thus help limit peoples' 'artistic' freedoms of throwing in whatever they want.

I've had to do many ppt templates, and trust me, I'd much rather have the hastle of control than the embarassment of chaos.

Amen to that! We also usually end up giving a little free advice on copyrighted materials and what they can and cannot use, just to be on the safe side.

I setup templates all the time for my job.

They're easy once you get used to them. I actually dumped Flash for Powerpoint, as PPT can do many of the animations needed, perhaps Flash was overkill for the projects, but PPT worked out nicely, and others can edit.

I'd much rather hand off templates with all the correct things in them, and if they mess them up well that's that.


I used to take strict control, creating things in InDesign and making Flash files and/or PDFs, or make complete Flash files in Flash. But it was far too consuming in one aspect to construct the files, and the other aspect of making changes every day or every week.


Once I moved all the templates to Powerpoint, they are happy, and they don't usually bother me unless they need an image changed or something.

Which is me basically opening the template and dragging a picture in place and resending them the file.


That's the job.

@ker ning : PowerPoint for sure isn't a 'designers' tool but it is in use by over 500m users so we have to embrace it as a 'presentation' medium and forget that it includes some really basic graphics authoring tools. Just like the old OHP (anyone remember?) it's the design environment that makes the design, not the projection equipment. No 'stand out' presentation is really created purely in PowerPoint these days.

Regarding consistency control, this is something we come across regularly and as PowerPoint add-in developers, we've even written some custom add-ins that check every object on every slide of a PowerPoint deck against a set of rules. Those rules can include position, font face, font size, theme element checks (colour palette, effects, fonts) and even a keep clear zone.

No matter what one does with templates, masters, layouts and themes (and yes: @garricks, slide masters and their associated templates are a must to... well... master!), users will always find a way to break what you've done so a post authoring tool like that could be pretty handy, even cool.

We've also recently done some rebranding work for a big brown shipping company that involved changing the template (postion, backgrounds, master, theme, layouts - the lot) for just under 2000 slides. If you've even done that, you'll know how repetitive and time consuming it is to reset the fonts from a fixed reference to one of the theme references. Here's a freebie to help you should you ever need it:

http://gmarkpowerpoint.blogspot.co.u...-use-your.html



Happy PowerPointing ;-)

Jamie.

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