PowerPoint Keeps Trashing Format (XP)

Topic

New Reply

What is the font size for the first level bulleted text in the slide master (View | Master | Slide Master)? The default is 32 points, and text has a tendency to revert to the settings in the slide master.

Reply | Quote

Replies

It is 32. If that is the cause of the problem, how do I fix it without screwing up other slides? If I reformat the master, then doesn’t that affect every slide.

Ronny

Reply | Quote

You should keep to the font sizes set in the slide master whenever possible – it is seldom a good idea to try to cram more text in a slide by reducing font size. But apart from that, I haven’t experienced the problem you mention myself (PowerPoint 2002 SP-3), and if Wendell’s suggestion doesn’t help, I’m afraid I don’t know a solution. Hopefully someone else will have an idea.

Reply | Quote

I have a number of slides with formatting similar to the top slide shown below. The text is formatted as 22-points. When I close the presentation and reopen it, the slides have magically reformatted themselves to a larger font (32-point) as shown in the bottom slide below. I have fixed the slides three times now and every time I save the file and reopen it, this happens to exactly the same slides.

Word sometimes does screwy things like this and saving as a RTF document and then resaving as a DOC file usually fixes it. Does anyone know how I can fix this very annoying problem with PowerPoint?

Ronny

Reply | Quote

This could also be happening because you have the “AutoFit body text to placeholder” option turned on. You can turn that off using Tools / AutoCorrect and clicking on the “AutoFormat As You Type” tab. You may also get an option to turn this on or off while working on a text box or other object – it will appear as a smart tag, either at the lower left or lower right corner of the slide object you are editing.

Reply | Quote

It was turned on so I turned it off. That did not fix the problem but I can see where it would cause problems.

Ronny

Reply | Quote

I continued to battle this problem and I seem to have it whipped for now. This is part of a large contract job I am working on and reducing the text was not an option.

I hoped the problem was a corrupted slide so I created a new slide and carefully copied the various components to the new slide. Same problem. (Ugh!)

After a lot of experimenting, I figured out that if I bumped the font size up from 22-point to 24-points, the problem went away. I had to be creative to get everything to fix with the larger font but I made it so the problem is (sort of) resolved for now.

Nevertheless, this is not something PowerPoint should be doing.

Ronny

Reply | Quote

You’re correct, it’s not something PPT should be doing. It’s actually a bug. PowerPoint is reapplying the first slide master to the slide.

One thing that sometimes works is to go to View/Master/Slide Master and use a different slide master as the first one. Just drag and drop a different master to the front of the list of slide masters.

Another thing that will work is to create a new slide master with appropriate font size settings and apply that to the slide in question. (Someone suggested this already, I think.)

What I sometimes end up doing is copying the placeholder and pasting it back on the slide, deleting the original placeholder. Now the placeholder isn’t a placeholder, and so it won’t change font size to match the font size in the placeholder on the first master slide. This can be a hassle when you apply a different template or copy the slide into a new presentation, but it’s a quick fix that’s guaranteed to work in the specific presentation you’re struggling with, anyway. Better to create a proper master for the slide, though.

Reply | Quote