Design Converter

This article explains what Design Converter is and how it can be used to facilitate the conversion of PowerPoint presentations to a different theme. Additionally, some best practices will be provided to ensure the most successful conversions. Lastly, some known limitations will be highlighted for transparency purposes.

What is Design Converter?

When going through a rebranding, or when needing to create custom presentations using another template than the organization's one, it is very cumbersome to manually copy, paste, and adjust each slide to the destination template. Design Converter will be able to support the conversion by smartly and quickly executing some of the manual steps automatically, reducing the total amount of time to reach the perfect conversion.

As an example, Design Converter will go through a smart logic to apply the most fitting layout from the destination template to each slide in order to reduce the manual adjustments that will be required after the conversion:

1. It will first look in the master view if there is matching layout with the same name.
2. If an exact match cannot be found, it will try finding the closest layout based on type of content and placeholders.
3. If a closest layout cannot be found, it will choose a default layout. This is a layout which has only a title (or similar slide) and retain the elements position on the slide level.

Main uses cases supported by Design Converter

Rebrand

When going through a rebranding, a lot of PowerPoint collaterals must be updated to reflect the new corporate identity which represents a lot of manual work. In order to speed up the overall project, Templafy will allow to push the new, rebranded template to all users within Design Converter so they can usually use the new corporate identity to convert the required presentations.

Custom presentation

When working with presentations from multiple organizations, it will often be required to move content from one design to the other. For instance, to adjust a presentation using your organization’s template to use a customer’s template instead. These types of custom presentations represent a great amount of manual work. To facilitate some of the conversion steps, the Design Convert will allow users to select a custom template to convert the presentation to.

Using the Design Converter

1. Open the presentation you would like to convert in PowerPoint.
2. In the Templafy tab, click on Design Converter.
3. In the Design Converter task pane, select the desired option:
   • User your organization's template will convert the presentation using a template distributed via Templafy Desktop.
     This option will not be displayed if no default Design Converter template is being distributed to the end-users, please reach out to your Templafy contact for support.
   • Select template from computer will open the file explorer allowing the user to select the desired template.
4. Once you have selected the desired option, the conversion will automatically start. Once completed, the converted presentation will open in a new PowerPoint window. Additionally, the converted presentation will be saved at the same location of the original presentation using "_converted" as a postfix.

Uploading and editing the default template for Design Converter

Uploading a default template to the Admin Center will ensure that it is easily assessable for users. To upload a default template, do the following: 

1.  Navigate to the Productivity in the Admin Center.
2.  Select the Design Converter tab.
3.  Upload the template by clicking on the small square upload button.

   Important Only .pptx filetype is supported.

4.  Enter the name of the template in the text box. 

   Note This name will be displayed for the end user on the button activating the conversion inside PowerPoint.

Once uploaded, Admins will be able to replace, download, or delete the template. To access the edit menu of the template, do the following steps:

1. Click on the ellipsis.
2. Select the right action (Replace, Download or Delete).

End users will now be able use this default in the conversion process as seen below: 

Setting up the destination template to get the most successful conversion result 

When using Design Converter to convert presentation A using template B, all the slides present in presentation A will be transferred to use the theme and layouts from template B. To ensure the best conversion result, we recommend ensuring the following:

1. The layout names and placeholders are matching between the presentation to convert and the destination template.
2. The number of placeholders and shapes on the layouts should ideally match.

Once the conversion is finalized, none of the master layouts from presentation A will be present in the final/converted presentation.

Understanding the layout matching steps

To find the most fitting layout between the layout used for each slide in presentation to convert and the destination template layouts, the following steps are taken:

1. Check if the layout name in the destination template matches or is similar to the layout used on the slide from the presentation to convert.
2. Check placeholder similarities between the destination template layouts and the layout used on the slide from the presentation to convert:
   • Check if the layouts have the same number of the same placeholder types.
   • Check if the sizes of placeholders of the same type are similar.
   • Check if the title components and their positioning.

The first step holds the greatest amount of influence and weight over the entire process. If a match isn’t found based on the layout name, the placeholder matching takes full responsibility. If no matching layout can be found after the above-mentioned steps, the first non-blank layout found containing the lowest number of placeholders will be used.

Similar masters and similar layouts 

In the case of several master and several layouts having similar name and placeholder placements, the first matching layout found will be used for conversion. This is often the case for layouts used for Dividers/Breakers in a presentation. To influence the layout that will be used by default for conversion, one can reorder these layouts and put the preferred layout as the first one in the list.

Example 1: 

• I have one master containing the following layouts in this order Divider A, Divider B, and Divider C  = Divider A will be used by default for conversion.
  
• If Divider B or Divider C should be used by default, the desired divider layout (B or C) can be dragged and dropped before Divider A.

Example 2:

• I have two masters, master 1 is the first one appearing in the master view and does not contain any Divider layout / master 2 is the second one appearing in the master view and contains Divider A, Divider B, and Divider C = Divider A from master 2 will be used by default for conversion.
• If Divider B or Divider C should be used by default, the desired divider layout (B or C) can be dragged and dropped before Divider A.

Example 3:

• I have two masters, master 1 is the first one appearing in the master view and contains the following layouts in this order Divider A, Divider B, and Divider C / master 2 is the second one appearing in the master view and contains Divider D = Divider A from master 1 will be used by default for conversion.
• If Divider D from master 2 should be used by default, the master 2 can be dragged and dropped before master 1.

What cannot be solved yet with Design Converter? 

Currently, Design Converter does not work well with the following items, and results may therefore vary:

• Unsaved presentations.
• The Custom Backgrounds set on the presentation to convert will not be carried over in the converted presentation.
• Converting to a template using a smaller slide size (converting to a template using a larger slide size will work).
• Comments.