A close friend and excellent presenter, Sandra, called in a semi-panic the other night. “How do you get PowerPoint to show all my slides the right way? It’s changed all the fonts and the background is gone!”
I knew exactly what had happened: “Did you give someone else your slides to project from their computer?”
“Yes,” she replied.
“Did they merge your slides into their slide deck?” I asked.
“They did. It’s a disaster. What can I do?”
“The best and probably simplest answer is to use your original PowerPoint presentation on your computer without merging it with anyone else’s. Can you do that?”
Fortunately for Sandra, she had the time and the ability to switch it back to her computer. Her presentation went well from that point on.
This brings up one of the very big problem areas that PowerPoint has: most presentations don’t play well with others when they are merged. Templates change, backgrounds change and font colors and typefaces can change. In fact, so much can happen just from merging your presentation with another one that you will be overwhelmed with how to fix it all – especially if time is short and you have more than a few dozen slides.
The simple solution: don’t do it. Insist, if you can, that you run your slide deck from your computer. That way the fonts, colors and everything else will look the way you created it.
But there will be times when your meeting planner will insist that your slides be placed on their equipment. If the event has a savvy AV crew they will know how to make it all work.
If you must merge your slides into another here are some tips to help you avoid the disaster Sandra faced:
- Embed your fonts in the file. In the recent versions of PowerPoint you have the option of embedding TrueType fonts into the main PowerPoint file. It is found under
File > Options > Save > Embed fonts in file - When you merge your slides with another deck be sure to use the Keep source formatting option under the Paste Options command. Access this by right clicking in the slide sorter pane.
- Be aware that your Standard format deck (4:3) and the Widescreen format decks (16:9) will not fit together precisely. There will be blank space either on the sides or on top and bottom.
- Allow time and opportunity to fix things if they go wrong. And for goodness sake, do a run through on the actual equipment you will use before the presentation. You don’t want any last second unpleasant surprises.
