PowerPoint Slide Master - Placeholder order numbers

And you'd have been 100% correct! Copying didn't help at all!

The trouble is that it's a big, complex template and recreating each layout it would be a monster task so I was trying to find a way around having to do that. It looks great but for power users who do swap between layouts (rather than just taking a simple layout and messing with it manually), having the content jump around is a bit of a pain.

So I think we're going to have to live with the inconvenience unless someone figures out a way to "reorder" the placeholders.

Thanks!

M

Thanks Cliff. It seems odd to me that this hasn't come up somewhere else. I'd have expected it to be pretty standard for templates to have multiple layouts with some common elements in this way.

Hopefully someone somewhere has figured it out!

Thanks so much John. I wondered if it was something like that and could see that cutting/pasting placeholders in Slide Master view was changing the order when I reset the slide, but couldn't quite map my actions to the outcome. I'd hoped that this was the same order as found in the Selection Pane, but changing order there had no impact on the placeholder order.

I have no expectation of placeholder alignment on custom placeholders between layouts, but if I can get the common placeholders aligned across the layouts so they don't jump around, that's a major win.

I'll try reworking the slide layouts creating the placeholders in order.

Cheers,

M

The names of placeholders do not affect the order in which content is placed in them.

When layouts have different numbers of placeholders, it's tricky to avoid this issue entirely. You last screen shot shows a layout with 3 placeholders followed by one with 5. If a 5-placeholder layout is switched to 3, there are 2 extra content items that cannot be assigned to a placeholder. The content will be orphaned and often end up at the right or left side of the slide.

Create placeholders in the order in which they are to be filled: top to bottom, left to right. Then content will pop to the appropriate placeholder. If the new layout has fewer placeholders, it will always be the last placeholder contents that will be orphaned, which is at least predictable.

It also helps to use placeholders that have a function that is in accord with your design. In your example, you have a Section Title. These work best if you use the Footer placeholder for them, since then a user can select a section of slides and easily apply the same text to each slide in the section using the Insert>Header & Footer command. Footer placeholders never get confused with other placeholder types.

Dear M,

Based on the different layout on the master slide, the placeholder number can't be kept. I'm afraid that there is no out-of-the-box way doing that.

I'll leave the thread open and welcome other community members to share their suggestions and ideas.

As our product developers are willing to hear the users' suggestions, I kindly suggest you submit your feedback on the Feedback platformto our product developers so that they can know your requirements and ideas for product improvements.

Thanks for your understanding and have a nice day!

Sincerely,

Cliff | Microsoft Community Moderator