Effective Ways for Getting Rid of Templates in PowerPoint

Sometimes you may wish to design a presentation right from the scratch as you get bored with the same old templates. Yes, it is possible to design your own template and create unique power slides all by yourself. You can take help from the powerslides.com to obtain various ideas for creating your own presentation.

You can also start without any template just with blank spaces. The slides can contain some amount of texts, an image and some white space. This method of the minimalist style can often be termed as the Lessig or the Takahashi method as both of them used this particular style. You can keep the slide simple by just a single image and one or two words.

Steps for Applying New Template:

For the 2002 and 2003 version of PowerPoint, you can use the following steps:

Select the format > slide design for opening the task pane of the Design

After that, you can select the Default Design.pot under the section ‘Available for Use’

Sometimes the Default Design.pot can be named as the blank.pot

For removing the present template of the single slide, you can choose the left pane slide and then can start opening the design task pane. You can then select the down arrow instead of clicking on the Default design.pot image and can select ‘Apply to Selected Slides’

In the PowerPoint 2007, the process is slightly different. You are required to select the blank slide from the group of Themes in the design tab. The tooltip of PowerPoint 2007 is the Office theme. You can perform a right click to the Office theme image and finally choose the ‘Apply to Selected Slides’

The PowerPoint can hide the actual file which is known as blank.pot in 2003. The template should be named as blank.pot.

If you are unable to find Design task pane, you can open a new template like this:

  • New Presentation can be started
  • In the task pane of the new presentation, blank presentation can be selected. In 2007, you can use the design tab and can select the Office theme
  • You can change the theme according to your wish
  • You can now save the new file
  • In the ‘Save As’ dialog box, you can choose the design template (*.pot) from the drop down list of Save as Type. In case of 2007, you are required to select PowerPoint Template (*.potx). The folder will automatically change to the default Templates folder after performing this step.
  • You can type ‘Blank’ in the text box of the file names. The extension of the file names can be added automatically.
  • Finally you should click the ‘save’ button

Change the Current Theme:

The current theme can be changed with the following steps:

  • Click ‘more’ on the ‘themes’ group within the ‘Design’ tab
  • After that you can do any of the following :
    • You can download free themes from the Office Online
    • For applying a custom theme, you can search from different locations. You can select ‘Browse For Themes’ and then select the themes you desire
    • For applying the built-in themes you can select under the ‘Built-in’ option
    • To apply a theme, which is newly created, you can modify and save under the Custom section.

As every presentation contains template, you cannot simply remove them. You can just apply different template or can create blank templates as according to your requirement. So, you can apply different themes and start your presentation right from the scratch. You just need to follow the simple steps separately in different versions of PowerPoint.

Guest article written by: Ronald Anderson is well known software professional who uses different power slides from the powerslides.com for preparing his presentation. In this article he shares some tips to make a presentation without default templates.

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