How to put an existing deck on your company template without rebuilding it by hand

To put an existing deck on your company template properly, every slide has to be rebuilt from the template's own layouts, with the text, pictures and charts placed into its placeholders. Pasting slides onto a new master does not do that, which is why the result usually looks half-converted. Done by hand it takes a designer most of a day; wetria does it in about 13 minutes.

Why copy-paste onto a new master fails

PowerPoint keeps two things apart: the layouts that belong to the master, and the boxes someone drew on each slide. A deck built without the template is almost all hand-drawn boxes. When you paste it onto the new master, or apply the template as a theme, the colours and fonts may change, but the boxes stay where they were.

• Titles sit in a different place on every slide, because they were never in the title placeholder.
• Text overflows, because the template's type scale is larger than the old one.
• Charts keep their old colours, because the chart palette lives in the template's theme, not on the slide.
• Logos and footers double up: the template adds its own, the old slide still carries the pasted one.

What a proper move involves

A designer moving a deck by hand works slide by slide. For each one they choose the closest layout in the template, move the title into the title placeholder and the body into the body placeholder, rebuild charts so they inherit the template's colours, and re-check that nothing was lost. It is careful, repetitive work. On a 30-slide deck it fills a day.

How wetria does it

The Adapt to template service does the same work in the same order. You upload your template once, as a .pptx or .potx. The system spends about two minutes reading it: the layouts, the sample slides, up to 400 pictures and icons, logo variants for light and dark backgrounds, colour roles, the chart palette, the type scale and how much text each placeholder holds. After that it is there for every deck, and only your account sees it.

A real run: a vendor's proposal moved onto an agency's template, sixteen slides, 146 tokens. Names, figures and logos were changed with Sanitize before these images were made; the layouts are the run's.

Then you attach a deck and add a line if you need one, for example "Keep our own cover slide as it is; rebuild every other slide on the template." Every slide is rebuilt from your layouts and every word and picture is carried over as it is, nothing rewritten. Before you see the result, every slide is checked against your original.

What to check before you send it

• Open the slide master view and click through a few slides. Each one should use a template layout, not a blank layout with boxes.
• Click a chart and open its data. It should be a live chart in the template's colours, not a picture.
• Compare the word count of a dense slide with the original. Nothing should be missing.
• Look at the footer and the logo on light and dark slides. There should be one of each, in the right variant.

When the template itself is the problem

Moving a deck works only as well as the template allows. If the master has three layouts and no chart styles, every deck will look like the same three slides. That is a template problem, and no tool solves it by moving content. We wrote about the difference in template systems that scale and why brand guidelines are not a template. If you need the master itself designed, that is a studio project: see presentation design.