Reusing Elements Across Slides With Keynote Layouts

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let  me show you how you can use Slide Layout in Keynote to repeat elements across different slides. 

I'm going to create a new presentation here in Keynote. I'm going to use the basic black template there and let's say I want to have slides that have some similar elements across each slide. I'm going to add a new slide here. You notice all of these different slide layouts here. These come with that template. So you'll see different ones depending upon which template you start with. I'm going to choose the blank slide here, the simplest one, and let's add some text. I'll click on the Text button there at the top and I'll add something, like My Presentation, maybe to have a consistent title across the top. I'll move it there to the top left. I'll make it Bold. Let's go ahead and add a line, like that, and I'll put the line just under that stretching all the way across, like that. Let's make it a little bit thicker here. I'll make the Stroke a few more pixels in height. Let's say I want to have this appear on all my slides. 

If I go to create a new slide and I use Blank again it is just blank there. I would have to Copy and Paste it here. So that would give me the same thing across slides. But if I made a change, like I change the font or the color or the size of this line I'd have to go and change that on each slide. Instead I can put these elements, the ones I want to be seen across several slides onto my own Slide Layout so that I can just use that slide layout and have only one place to change them. 

I'm going to have these two items selected here and Command C to copy. Now I'm going to go to View and I'm going to choose Edit Slide Layouts. I can see all those layouts that I saw on the list before now on the left sidebar. I can jump around between them and I hit Edit, not slide, but Slide Layout including this last one here at the end. The blank one. I could also go to this Plus Button, which before allowed me to add a new slide, but now that I'm viewing Slide Layouts it will allow me to add a new slide layout starting with one of the existing ones. 

So I'll start with Blank and I'll create another one and I'm going to name it Blank Copy. But I'm going to double click here on the name and call it something else like Standard. Now I'm editing this one. Remember I copied those two elements before so I'm going to Command V and paste. It pastes them both in here. So you can see the Standard Slide Layout that I just created has those two elements on it. Now I'm going to Exit Slide Layout here, clicking Done at the bottom. 

Let's go ahead and get rid of those slides I created. I just have this default slide here. I'm going to add a new slide but instead of using Blank I'm going to use the newly created Standard slide layout. Now you can see I've got those elements there. If I try to select them I can't. They are on the slide layout. Kind of a bottom layer, not the layer I can edit. But I can do other things here. For instance I can add a shape. I'll just put a Star here as an example. Just place that in the middle. I can add another slide using Standard here. For this one let's put a Pie Chart. So I'll just put that in the middle. Let's add a third slide based on the Standard slide layout. I'm going to put some text here and I'll just have something here. So now I've got three slides all of which have text and that line from the layout. 

Now let's say I want to change what this says here. I can now go back into Editing Slide Layouts, like this. Select that layout here and now I can change those elements. Like I can change it to that. Maybe I will go ahead and change this to make it a color like that. Now I'm going to Exit Editing Slide Layouts and I can see everywhere that slide layout is used I've got the new text there and a new line there. So I essentially edited elements that appeared across three or as many slides that you want, whichever slides you used, with that Standard slide template. 

So on Slide Templates you can add text, you can add shapes like lines and rectangles and circles. You can add images. You can add any element that you would normally add using Keynote and they would appear on all the slides that use that template. They kind of form a layer behind everything. You can also add something called Place Holders. 

So let's go back here into Editing the layout and I've got the Standard layout there selected. I'm going to create another textbox and I'm going to put this one at the top right here. I'm going to stretch it out. I'm going to make it, say, right justified here. I'm going to call this the Slide Title. What I'm going to do is put a select the text inside of the textbox. Under Format I'm going to go to Advanced and I'm going to define this as a Text Place Holder. So what's going to happen now is when I exit editing the slide layout all three of these have Slide Title on them. So nothing different than what I have with the text on the left. 

But I can now edit this text here. So I can edit it to have, you know, slides this and it's going to be different than this one. Slide that and different again from this one. Slide other. So, it allows me to have a textbox that is the same across all of these. But the text in it varies. If now I go in here to Edit Slide Layouts and say, Boy I really wish I had made this bold. I could go in here and change the font style to Bold. Maybe I'll change the color there and make it that color. Now notice that it changed it across all those slides. It's only the actual text that changed, not the other properties of that textbox. 

You can do the same thing with images. If I go in and edit the slide layouts and then I add an image here, I'll just Drag & Drop an image in, and I place it here in the slide I can make this the same image across all the slides. But I could also, with it selected, go into Format, Advanced, and make this a Media Place Holder. So now I can change the image there. Let's exit the editing mode there and you could see that image appears across all of these. I can click here and then I could Search Content Hub. Choose a different file. I'll do that and let's select this one here. It'll change the image here on this slide but not the other. So it allows me to basically predefine where an image is on a slide and then change that image on a slide-by-slide basis. 

Now note you can move these around. I can grab this text here, and grab this here. If you do there's a handy little way to get them back into the positions they're in for the slide layout. Control Click on them and you can see Reapply Layout to Objects. The same thing here for this image. So in case you accidentally move something you can get it back to looking like the other slides. 

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Also, when you're editing Slide Layouts you have some options here on the right. One is to allow layering. What that will do is it will allow you to then take a new element, something on the slide, and move it behind a Slide Layout Element. So, with that turned On here for this slide I could go back here and let's say I want this to go behind the image. But this is on the Slide Layout and this is on the individual slide. I can still do Arrange and send it back because I have that checkbox turned On it allows me to send this behind Slide Layout elements. 

Now you can also combine regular text styles with the Slide Layouts for even more control. So, for instance, I've got the Standard Slide Layout here. I'm going to Control Click on it and then duplicate it. So I can have the Standard one, I'll call this Standard 1 there, and I'll call this Standard 2. Maybe I want to have two variations of the same thing. Like in this one here I want to not have an image there and, let's say, I'm going to have everything be at the bottom instead of at the top. So I'm going to move this down here, like this, and move the line up above. So, I have the ability to choose this version or this version. Standard 1 or Standard 2. But it would still be nice to be able to change the text colors here, say, and have it go for both slide layouts. Or maybe I have 17 different standard slide layouts I'm using and I want to be able to change the color or font of this piece of text across all of them. Well, I can do that by selecting it and then using the Standard Text Paragraph Styles. I'm going to add one here and I'm going to call this, you know, Slide Title. This is now Slide Title Paragraph Style. I'm going to go over here and I'm going to select this text and I'm going to change this to also be Slide Title. So they are both using it. This is the same technique you would use in Pages with Paragraph Styles and in Keynote on regular slides. 

But I'm using those Paragraph Styles right here in the Slide Layouts. So now when I go back to my presentation and let's say I want to add another slide and this one is going to use Standard 2. So I've got Standard 1, Standard 1, Standard 1, and Standard 2 here and I give this another title, like that. I can change the color across all of these by just selecting one, changing its color, let's say change it to a red like that. Then I'm going to update the Slide Title Style which will update it across these three slides on Standard 1, but I was using the same style in Standard 2 so it changes it there as well. 

So Paragraph Styling, Character Styling, Shape Styling can all be used on Slide Layout Elements as well as on regular slide elements. One last thing I want to show you is you can change which Slide Layout is used. Remember this is using Standard 2. This is using Standard 1. I can switch that and notice here if I have the Format Sidebar selected and I'm not using another element here, I just have the background selected, I can select Slide Layout. See all the different Slide Layouts and then I can switch to Standard 2 here. You could see how it changed the Slide layout. So I could that easily for any slide that I want, switching between the layouts and it will adjust the element appropriately. Notice how it remembered the Slide Title for each one of these. 

So if you're looking to go up a level in Keynote Presentations learn how to use Slide Layouts. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.