Reapplying Slide Layouts in PowerPoint 2003 for Windows

Slide Layouts are arrangements of placeholders that make it easy for you to create consistent looking slides. You can change between the slide layout applied to any slide but there may be times when the slides themselves may have been individually altered so that the consistency factor is absent altogether! Do any of these scenarios sound familiar:

• The title placeholders in your PowerPoint slide may move to another position because you inadvertently let the cursor slip off your fingers, and you only realize this after you have already saved the presentation, and can no longer undo.
• Or you may have received a presentation from a colleague who has made some changes to text -- for example, 6 pt Algerian font face in light yellow color over a white background.

While you can manually correct all these discrepancies, it goes without saying that you will be spending a huge amount of time making these corrections -- and that's entirely unrequired for since we will show you how you can get over this problem with just a friendly click or two.

Look at the slides in Figure 1, which shows all slides within the Slide Sorter view of a sample "bad" presentation -- don't they look like they have been through hell? Fortunately all slides in PowerPoint are invariably based on a template even if you are not aware of this fact -- so we can quickly ask PowerPoint to reset these slides to their pristine, baked-fresh-from-the-template state -- follow these steps to create some magic:

Figure 1: All the "bad" slides: inconsistent and unprofessional

1. Open your presentation for which you want to reset the layouts (refer to Figure 1 above). Now, activate PowerPoint's Slide Layout task pane by choosing the Format | Slide Layout menu option, as shown in Figure 2.
2. 
   Figure 2: Slide Layout option within the Format menu
2. This brings up the Slide Layout task pane on the right side of the PowerPoint 2003 interface, which you can see in Figure 3 (highlighted in red). This contains all the Slide Layouts available in PowerPoint 2003.
3. 
   Figure 3: Slide Layout task pane in PowerPoint 2003
3. Select any slide to see which layout is associated with that particular slide -- as you can see in Figure 3, we selected slide 3, and its associated layout was highlighted by PowerPoint (note the blue bounding box around one of the slide layout thumbnails - pointed through the green arrow).
4. Now, different slides in your presentation may have different layouts applied -- you can individually select them one at a time to find which layout each slide is associated with. If all of the slides are using the same layout, just select them all by pressing the Ctrl + A key. At this time, make sure that you have the slide (or all slides) selected.


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4. Place your cursor above the layout thumbnail that has the bounding box. You will see a small button to the right of this thumbnail with a down arrow. Click this button to bring up the menu you see in Figure 4. Within this menu select the Reapply Layout option (highlighted in red in Figure 4).
5. 
   Figure 4: Reapply Layout option
Note: Does your slide not reset to look like the original template even after reapplying the layout? No problem -- reapply the layout once again -- in fact most times, you will have to select the Reapply Layout option twice.
5. This resets the layout of the selected slides to their pristine, baked-fresh-from-the-template state as shown in Figure 5. Compare Figures 5 and 1 to see the changes.
6. 
   Figure 5: Layout reset on all slides
7. Save your presentation often.