Store a PowerPoint template

As an administrator you store a PowerPoint template once. After that, all answers exported as PowerPoint appear in your corporate design.

A PowerPoint template follows entirely different rules from a Word template. Word works with named bookmarks (Store a Word template), PowerPoint with placeholder types. Treat them as the same and you build a template the analyzer cannot see — hence this separate article.

Upload

• Allowed extensions: .potx or .pptx. Maximum size 2 MB.
• Location: Administration → System settings → Document export.
• After the upload the file is analyzed; you confirm or correct the proposed assignment and see a preview with sample content.

The three roles

The template must offer three prototypes, each assigned to a role:

Role	For	Needs at least
Cover slide	first slide with title and export details	a title placeholder
Section divider	every # heading in the answer	a title placeholder
Content slide	everything else: text, bullets, tables, images	a body placeholder

Both example slides in the file and slide layouts of the master qualify as prototypes. Example slides are proposed preferentially because they carry visibly applied formatting that a layout placeholder does not always inherit.

The decisive rule: placeholders count, not names

The analysis is purely structural. It reads neither layout nor shape names, nor the PowerPoint layout type — the evanto reference template reports the type Custom for all of its layouts, so detection by name or type would demonstrably have no effect there.

Only genuine placeholders are detected:

• Title — the placeholder types Title, Centered title, Vertical title.
• Body — Text/Content, Subtitle, Object, Vertical text.
• Not detected: Slide number, Footer, Date — they are left untouched so the template keeps filling them itself. That is intentional, not a shortcoming.

Most common mistake: a plain text box instead of a placeholder. Visually identical, but invisible to the analysis — a slide made entirely of text boxes counts as “without structure”. Placeholders are only created in the slide master view.

If the whole file offers no title or body placeholder at all, the application reports “no usable structure” and exports in the neutral default design.

How the proposal is formed

Useful to know when the proposal surprises you:

• Content slide = the prototype with the largest body area.
• Cover slide = the first remaining prototype with a title placeholder.
• Section divider = the next one after that; if there is only one titled prototype, the cover and divider share it.

The proposal is never binding — you correct the assignment via a dropdown.

Cover slide: the […] tokens

The cover slide is not overwritten but filled in: the template’s paragraphs stay, only tokens in square brackets are replaced, e.g. [Author name]. Detection works via the label before them — so the captions should read:

• Created by: → author
• Date: → export time
• Classification: → classification
• a line without a label takes the subtitle/version

Anything the export has no value for is cleared — a raw […] never reaches the reader. Several credit lines may sit in one paragraph with soft line breaks; bold labels are preserved.

Further notes

• Formatting is inherited: bullets, fonts and colors come from the template’s placeholder. No explicit fonts are set on purpose.
• A second body placeholder on the content slide is cleared so no prototype bullets show through.
• Template replaced = confirm the assignment again. The saved assignment points at slides and layouts by position. If the file is replaced by one with a different slide order, the old assignment is invalid; the application then falls back to the default design instead of rendering incorrectly. So confirm the assignment again after every replacement.
• The export never fails. Unreadable template, missing role, unresolvable image: the result is a worse deck, never an error message. A deck in the default design is therefore not a bug but the fallback.

What’s next

• Export a response as PowerPoint (user view)
• Store a Word template for export — the bookmark model for comparison
• Document export (overview)