When working with PowerPoint templates, it is good to remember that they are not all the same and you will not need them for every project. To help guide you through the template-making process, here are some tips.
Exhaust all the information that you can include in a template; after all, it is much easier to omit or eliminate some of the data than it is to remember to include more data.
If, for example, you are creating a presentation template for your sales team, there are certain crucial sections you want to include like quarterly versus monthly sales, but if you leave them out when creating the template, you may forget to include them in the final presentation and end up having an incomplete document. It is best to make it as comprehensive as possible and then omit what does not apply.
The template should have well-defined areas that will need to be customized. If you are dealing with variables, it should be as clear as daylight that a particular area needs to be filled in. When you are using a PowerPoint based template editor like Windward, it will be able to identify such areas and automatically fill it in.
You need to have a simple and clear naming system so that if you are looking for a particular template, you will find it with ease. Using the word template in the name is a good idea, but you should add another name to differentiate it from other templates. For example “sales template” is easier to find than just “template” which may bring out results for many other irrelevant templates.
Presentation templates are not very different from any other document template. You can choose a template from an existing list or you can customize your own and then add your slides and style. Where you will have variable elements, indicate them and you will be able to fill them using a powerful PowerPoint based template editor like Windward.
A great thing about PowerPoint is that it provides you with the ability to have your templates on the go. Its cloud-based presence means that anywhere there is an internet connection you can have different templates you have created.
Generally using PowerPoint is easy as you simply need to choose the slides you wish to use for a presentation and then insert them where you want them to be.
It is important though that you do not get carried away by the simplicity and you start creating a number of templates that you do not even need. Always lookout for some that may be duplicated.
Templates should help you spare more time to focus on the substance of your work instead of spending time putting together designs to use in a presentation document. If you produce a number of similar documents every day, then templates may save you a lot of time.
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Adds various capabilities such as inequalities,descending sort, joins, and other functions.
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SQL Select Debugger
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Added a Query tab as a field for typing or pasting in a select statement
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All tags using that Data source will be automatically updated with that name.
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New single interface to replace 2 separate dialog boxes
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Displays of all the tags in the template, structured as they are placed in the template. This provides a simple & intuitive way to see the structure of your template. Also provides the capability to go to any tag and/or see the properties of any tag.
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The ability to integrate the Windward Engine into Google’s cloud computing platform for developing and hosting web applications dubbed Google Applications Engine (GAE).
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This new integration will allow for processing of complex scripts and bi-directional text such as Arabic. Your PDF output will be much tighter and more closely match your template, and we’ll be able to respond rapidly to PDF requests and fixes.
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Includes support for new ForEach and slide break handling, table header row repeat across slide breaks, and native Microsoft support for charts and images.
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Tags are color coded in the template by type, making it easy to visually identify them.
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Version 13’s core code has been reworked and optimized to offer a reduced memory footprint, faster PDF generation and full documentation of supported features and limitations in the specifications for DOCX, XLSX and PPTX.
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Documents can include advanced Word image properties such as shadows, borders, and styles.
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Windward has updated HTML output to reflect changing HTML standards.
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Windward now works with a slew of new datasources: MongoDB, JSON, Cassandra, OData, Salesforce.com
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The Generate Code tool in the designer allows you to open an existing template and, with a click of a button, automatically create a window with the code needed to run your current template with all data sources and variables. Simply copy this code and paste into your application's code in the appropriate place. You now have Windward integrated into your application.
You only need to do this once. You do not do this for each template. Instead, where it has explicit files for the template and output, change that to parameters you pass to this code. Same for the parameters passed to Windward. This example uses explicit values to show you what to substitute in where.
Any pivot tables in an XLSX template are carried over to the XLSX output. The ranges in the pivot ranges are adjusted to match the generated output. So your final XLSX will have pivot tables set as expected in the generated file.
This makes creating an XLSX workbook with pivot tables trivial.
In an imported sub-template, if its properties for a style (ex. Normal) differ from the parent template's properties for the style, the use in the sub-template can be set to either use the properties in the sub-template, or the properties in the parent.
You set to retain when you don't want the child template's styling to change when imported. You set to use the parent when you want the styling of the imported template to match the styling in the parent.
Any explicit styling is always retained. This only impacts styling set by styles.
Tags can be placed in text boxes. Including linked text boxes. This gives you the ability to set the text in a textbox from your data.
Tags can be placed in shapes & smart art. This gives you the ability to set the text in a shape from your data.
When generating HTML output, the engine can either write bitmaps as distinct files the generate HTML references, or it can embed the images in the HTML providing a single file for the output.
You can place tags in pretty much any part of a template, including in footnotes & endnotes.
Any parts of a DOCX or XLSX (PowerPoint does not support this) file that are locked in the template, will be locked the same in the output.
If a font used in the template does not exist on the server generating a report, the font to substitute can be specified.
In addition, if a glyph to be rendered does not exist in the font specified, you can specify the replacement font. This can be set distinctly for European, Bi-Directional, and Far East fonts.
If you need this - it's essential. And if you don't need it, it's irrelevant.
Windward enables you to build a document by applying multiple datasources to the template simultaneously. When Windward is merging the data into a template, it processes the template by handling each tag in order, and each tag pulls from different datasources. (As opposed to processing all of one datasource, then processing the next.)
This allows the select tag to use data from another datasource in its select. For example, if you are pulling customer information from one data source, you can then pull data from the sales datasource using the customer ID of the customer presently processing to pull the sales information for that customer. If you're interested in patching together your data from multiple datasources, read this post on our blog.
