Design Converter (Beta)

About this article

This article will explain what Design Converter is and how it can be utilized 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 the Design Converter and which uses cases does it support? 
• Setting up the destination template to get the most successful conversion result 
• Utilizing the Design Converter
• What cannot be solved yet with Design Converter? 

Prerequisites

What is the Design Converter and which uses cases does it support? 

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 these steps manually, reducing the total amount of time to reach the perfect conversion.

As an example, the 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 use cases that can benefit from Design Converter support 

Rebranding: 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 utilize 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 utilizing your organization’s template to utilize 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.

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

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.

Utilizing the Design Converter

1. Open the presentation 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
   • Use your organization's template will convert the presentation using a template distributed by your Templafy Admin
     This option will not be displayed if no default Design Converter template is being distributed to the end-users
   • 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.

What cannot be solved yet with Design Converter? 

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

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