How To Edit PowerPoint Templates

How To Edit PowerPoint Templates

You’ve purchased a beautiful PowerPoint template – congratulations! But now you have to edit it to make it fit your needs. Your next step is understanding how to:

  • update photos with your own
  • customize colors
  • edit text

Let us explore best practices in updating your PowerPoint presentation template to make it perfectly customized.

How To Update Images On A PowerPoint Template

Most PowerPoint templates will come with either stock or AI-generated images or with image placeholders that need to be replaced.

Follow these steps to replace the images, knowing that you’ll have options to use Microsoft’s bank of stock photos or your own files from your computer.

  1. Right click on the photo you’d like to replace
  2. Select “Change Picture”
  3. Select either “This Device” if you want to replace it with a picture from your computer OR
  4. Select “From Stock Images” if you want to browse Microsoft’s bank of stock photography

Once the new image is placed, if it doesn’t expand to fit the exact dimensions of the original image, you can adjust it.

Here is how you can modify the size or borders of the new image:

  1. Select the image you’d like to update
  2. Go to the Picture Format tab in the top ribbon
  3. Select the “Crop” button
  4. Use the sizing handles (see red arrow below) to change the area the picture spans.
    Use the white circles to resize the picture inside that showing area.

How To Update Colors On A PowerPoint Template

If you need to update the colors in your template, you can do this one of two ways:

  • Update the template colors globally, so all colors change in your presentation
  • Update the colors one-by-one of specific elements.

Here is how to do both.

To update PowerPoint template colors globally, you need to update the Master theme settings. If you’ve gotten your template from a reputable shop that maintains best practices in creating slides, updating your master settings should update the colors globally on all slides.

Updating PowerPoint’s Master Theme Colors

Go to “View” in your commands ribbon and select “Slide Master.” This will open up your Master Theme settings. This will look a little intimidating at first, but stick with us – updating the colors is straight-forward.

Now that you're in the Slide Master theme:

  1. Click on the “Colors” dropdown and select “Customize Colors”

  2. You can enter in a new color for each of the 6 theme custom colors, or just for one or two.

  3. Once you click on a color to customize, select “More Colors” and pick a color from the display or enter in your own custom Hex code below (if you need to match your own brand’s exact hex colors)

  4. Once you’re done, Select “Close Master View” from the top ribbon and watch your slides globally update!

Updating an Individual Element Color

If you’d like to update a single element without changing the global color scheme, that’s easy to do:

  1. Right click on the element you’d like to update
  2. Select “Fill” if you want to change it’s main fill color OR
    select “Outline” if you’d like to change it’s border/outline
  3. Choose a color from the existing global theme that shows up OR
    select “More Fill Colors” towards the bottom of the menu if you want to type in a custom color hex code

How To Update Text In A PowerPoint Template

Updating text in PowerPoint slides is fairly intuitive with one exception: you might find that you’re inadvertently changing the font type, size, or color of the text if you’re copy and pasting from a Word Doc or online page.

If you’re not carefully, the text’s styling can carry over with it and you’ll be left with slides that have mismatching font styles, sizes, or colors.

Here’s how to paste in text, while maintaining the carefully chosen font styles of the professional template:

  1. Copy the text you want to insert from your source
  2. Select the text you’d like to replace
  3. Right click on the selected text
  4. Select the “Paste Without Formatting” paste option (the 4th one)

With this approach, all text you paste in with retain the exact styling that it has in the template.

How Linia Presentations Can Help You With Advanced PowerPoint Editing

At Linia Presentations, we understand how important it is to create cohesive and professional presentations. That is why we offer PowerPoint design and editing courses to give you the tools to create compelling and professional slides without needing to hire design help. Our courses are taught by professional presentation designers who’ve worked with the biggest international companies and designed pitch decks that have raised billions in funding.

If you need to learn all the power of PowerPoint, check out our course on Designing Effective Slides or our course on PowerPoint animation.

You can also explore our professional presentation templates or single slides to quickly enhance your presentations. 

 

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