Template Rules

Overview

When members of your organization create new presentations, they do not usually start from scratch with a blank slide. They either use Macabacus' New Presentation tool, or they start with a presentation created previously. In the latter case, the risk is that new presentations created from old ones may not contain slides that your organization requires, and may not contain updated disclosures / disclaimers required by your legal department.

Macabacus' Template Rules, combined with the New Presentation tool, help ensure that presentations produced by your organization contain required legal and other content. Template Rules can be customized in the PowerPoint > Template Rules section of the Settings dialog, and are shared settings that can be applied for all Macabacus users in your organization.

Enforcement

Macabacus enforces Template Rules upon saving presentations, and in the event of a rules violation can either:

Warn the user about the violation, or
Warn the user about the violation and prevent saving

Macabacus also checks for rules violations when checking an entire presentation using Macabacus' Proofing tools.

Rules

Required Slides

Require any of the following slides in presentations containing a title page:

Legal notices
Contact information
Front cover
Back cover

Legal Notices

In presentations containing a legal notices slide, Macabacus can check legal notices text against similar text found in either:

The active presentation template
Any template published to a company and / or team library

Macabacus expects to find legal disclaimers and disclosures pre-populated on the legal notices layout (not slide) in presentations and templates, in accordance with recommended practices to avoid inadvertent modification of legal notices by users. For Macabacus to recognize legal notices on this layout, the textbox shape containing these notices must:

Contain at least 5 lines,
Contain at least 300 characters, and
Occupy at least 75% of the width of the slide

Users may notice a delay upon the saving a presentation the first time after PowerPoint is started, particularly if Macabacus must check multiple templates in one or more libraries over a slow network. This is because Macabacus caches legal notices in templates upon the initial save to expedite rules enforcement upon subsequent saves.

This documentation refers to Macabacus version 8.15.5. 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.