PowerPointPresentation Automation

Styles

Usage

One of PowerPoint's most curious deficiencies is Microsoft's omission of styles, like those provided in Word and Excel. Macabacus lets you define styles and apply them to shapes in your presentations, similar to how you use styles in Word and Excel. Styles are defined in your template's or presentation's slide master.

Apply Styles

Apply styles to one or more selected shapes from the Styles menu in the Shapes section of the Macabacus tab. This menu is populated from hidden shapes found on your presentation's slide master that satisfy the naming convention described below.

Reset Styles

Click the Reset Style button on the Styles menu to reset the formatting of selected shapes whose styles were previously applied using Macabacus to the style formatting defined in the slide master. Select slides to update styles on multiple slides at once.

This is primarily useful for updating shape formatting after styles have been edited in the slide master, or when you want to revert formatting changes made since the style was applied.

Configuration

Although styles can be configured for individual presentations, they are most useful when configured in the template (a .potx file) that you use to create presentations. In enterprise environments, this may be the Macabacus-enabled template published to a shared library. If you share a template containing styles this way, all Macabacus users will have access to the same styles.

Create Styles (Quickly)

To create a style quickly, select a shape with your desired style formatting and click the New Style button on the Styles menu. You may delete the original shape after you have created a style from it. The New Style button automates some of the steps in the manual approach to creating styles described below.

Create Styles (Manually)

1. Add Shapes to the Slide Master — To configure styles, open your template or presentation in Slide Master view and select the first slide master (not layout) that appears at the top of the left-hand pane of your PowerPoint window. Next, open PowerPoint's Selection pane (Alt+F10 or Home > Editing > Select > Selection Pane).

   Add shapes to the slide master that you want to make available for insertion from the Styles menu. As you add shapes to your slide master, they will appear on all child layouts whose Hide Background Graphics box is not checked. Ignore this for now—you will hide these shapes when you are done configuring them.

   Multiple slide masters

   If your template or presentation contains multiple slide masters, only the first is used to implement styles.

2. Rename Shapes — In PowerPoint's Selection pane (Alt+F10), give each style shape a unique name that adequately describes its style. These names will appear under the Styles menu. Next, append the string [STY] to each style shape's name. This string instructs Macabacus to treat the shape as a style shape.
3. Hide Shapes — Hide all shapes configured as described above on your slide master. Macabacus only recognizes hidden shapes on your slide master with the naming convention described above as style shapes.

Edit Styles

You can edit and rename styles at any time without affecting styles functionality. Clicking the Macabacus > Styles > Edit Styles button will switch to Slide Master view, select the first slide master, unhide all Styles, and open PowerPoint's Selection pane to facilitate editing.

If you edit styles in a Macabacus-enabled template shared with multiple users across your organization, be sure to republish the template to your shared Macabacus library after editing.

This documentation refers to Macabacus version 9.4.1. Some features and descriptions of these features may not
apply to older versions of Macabacus. Update your Macabacus software to take advantage of the latest features.