Sep 25 2008
PowerPoint Templates: Beware of the Footers!
If you’ve recently upgraded from PowerPoint 2003 to PowerPoint 2007 at your company, you may have noticed something annoying with your corporate template. In some cases, corporate presentations need to have the same text added to all presentation slides. For example, many corporate templates are designed so that copyright and confidentiality statements such as “©2008 PowerPoint Ninja - Confidential and Proprietary” appear at the bottom of each slide.
Corporate templates frequently have text featured on all the slides such as this highlighted copyright and confidentiality statement.
In PowerPoint 2003, this text was typically inserted into a footer placeholder within the Slide Master. This approach would universally add the text to all of the slides, and it would be unalterable in the normal slide view. Perfect.
As my company transitioned over to PowerPoint 2007, we noticed a distinct difference in how the new version of PowerPoint handled these text placeholders. In PowerPoint 2007, the footers were now alterable (i.e., you could edit the text and re-position the entire placeholder), and they seemed to be disconnected from what was in the Slide Master.
We simply needed to update the copyright year from “2007″ to “2008″, but we found this simple task to be very difficult to achieve. Changing the year in the Slide Master had no effect on the existing layouts, existing slides, or even new slides that were created. In addition, slides inserted from older presentations would retain their older copyright year. The only way to change the text was to alter it on each individual slide. Not fun and not the solution I was hoping for.
What was the solution?
Text boxes can be distinguished from footers by the dash style. Text boxes have dashes while footers are dots when they are selected.
The key to fixing this problem is to use text boxes and not footers in the Slide Master. If you avoid using the default footer placeholder and use a text box instead, you will be able to create unalterable text on all of your slides. Like magic, all of the layouts and new slides will leverage the specified text in the Slide Master. I’m not sure why Microsoft changed the treatment of its footer placeholders in PowerPoint 2007. I imagine the change has impacted and will continue to impact more than just our corporate template. Learn from our painful experience and beware of the footers!
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April 17th, 2009 at 4:17 am
Nice notice. Disadvantage is that you can’t hide the text box in the first page. Or am I wrong?
Jan
April 19th, 2009 at 8:21 am
You are right that you can’t hide the text on a specific page. However, in the Slide Master you could create another copy of the same template and delete the text box. You could use that new layout for any page that you don’t want the text box to appear.
July 11th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
Is there any way to switch the type of an existing object from a footer to a text box?
July 11th, 2009 at 6:34 pm
Not that I’m aware of.
February 9th, 2010 at 10:18 am
You can also change the year or any other specific text i nthe footer by using the find and replace fucntion. Its an easy way to change the year as in the above article - much easier than creating a new text box.
February 10th, 2010 at 8:49 am
Your solution corrects the year or text, but it doesn’t remove the annoying placeholder, which is my main problem.
I’ve found that as I work on slides (moving objects around etc.), I accidentally move the placeholder because it is not embedded in the template like a text box would be. I want to get rid of the placeholder, not just update the text.
February 15th, 2010 at 12:22 pm
Good solution, but what about page numbers? These need to change on each page, so not sure the fix above works…grateful for any thoughts
February 15th, 2010 at 12:33 pm
You can put the page numbers in a text box as well. When you’re in the Slide Master view, create a text box and then on the Ribbon select the Insert tab. Within the Text module, you’ll see “Slide Number” as an option. Click on it and it will insert “< #>” into the text box.
In your presentation, you’ll see the actual slide number and you won’t be able to edit the slide numbers in the presentation view (which is what I want). I hope that helps.
March 1st, 2010 at 4:40 pm
Thanks so much for the text box hint. I swear I had the hardest time figuring these footers out. I hate these placeholders. They are good for nothing.
March 9th, 2010 at 1:28 pm
There’s actually a ‘master’ master slide. One master controls multiple layouts. When you go to the slide “master,” you’re only going to the layout, not the ‘master’ master. Notice the dotted white line to the left? Follow that up to a bigger slide in the left hand pane when viewing masters. You’ll see your master is connected to an uber master. Change the footer THERE, and it changes for all masters/layouts under that master.
Confusing, but works great.
March 20th, 2010 at 12:45 am
Lisa’s ‘master’-master technique works!
1000’s thanks.
Finally get some work done.
Can I send a bill on wasted working hours to gates ?
March 20th, 2010 at 8:12 am
My biggest beef with footers is not the master/child relationship (which I’ll admit can be confusing so thanks for the tip - Lisa). It’s with the fact that the footers are not embedded in the slide.
When I move things around, I hate accidentally grabbing the footer. The footer should not be editable on individual slides — only at the Slide Master view. The footer then becomes out of alignment with the placement on the other slides. Very annoying. That’s why I recommend the text box over the footer.
May 8th, 2010 at 5:11 pm
Thanks for your post! I have exactly the same problem using the Mac version of PPT 2008, but more so. I would like to use one of the solutions describe here, but I can’t find either the “Master master” slide or any way to insert a page number into a text box.
The “but more so” comment is because I find I can’t *ever* get rid of a placeholder once it’s been used. I want to use a different footer but even deleting it from the slide or notes master won’t make it go away. Any ideas about how to get rid of these and/or how I can get a page number into a text box would be appreciated.
What was MS thinking???
May 9th, 2010 at 8:06 am
Jack,
Unfortunately, I don’t have access to PPT 2008 at this time. In a few weeks, I’m going to be getting my first Mac. It might take me a while to re-orient myself in the Mac environment (I haven’t used a Mac since high school), but I’ll try to take a look at what you’ve described and see if I can find any solutions.
May 11th, 2010 at 4:09 pm
PPT-nin; Congrats on your new Mac. I expect you’ll love it!
I have fathomed answers to one of the problems I was having and ‘think’ I have an answer to another. Thought I’d be a good citizen and share here for any Mac users in the meantime.
The easiest one - I found out how to get a ‘page number’ on a slide. Mainly the problem was me thinking of this as a ‘page’ number. What MS calls this is the ‘Slide number’. Due to this I probably just overlooked the easy solution in my haste. Adding this is accomplished through the Insert menu’s “Slide Number” option.
The part I think I have right, is that what I take to be the Master Master slide is shown by choosing View -> Master -> Slide Master. A set of proto-slides is shown in a panel on the left. The top side is slightly larger. This is what I guess to be the “Master Master”. The problem I have with this is that making a change on this slide (such as adding a footer) is not passed ‘down’ automatically to all the other more specific masters. I have had to click on each one and use Insert -> Master Placeholders Footer on each and every one of the Master styles. Shouldn’t the purpose of the ‘Master Master’ be to set up formatting to be carried to the ‘Lesser Masters’?
Getting rid of old footers continues to be a nuisance. After un-checking the Footer check box in the View -> Header and Footer… dialog doesn’t do it. Deleting them off the Notes master doesn’t do it. Some combination of the above and replacing with a new footer does but what a pain!
Good luck with your Mac! Hope you enjoy it. If you’d like any Mac shopping help, please feel free to be in touch!
June 2nd, 2010 at 12:18 pm
Thank you to everyone who posted here. I have wasted hours trying to get the footer in our corporate ppt to work properly in 2007. The Master Master solution is great. Now that I have that working, what is the best way to get the footer not to appear on the cover page? Note: The layout for our presentation has 5 different masters.