Newsfeed
What does ShapeStyles do for me?
What are styles? Do I need them?
If you use Word's styles, you already have a pretty good idea of how ShapeStyles works and how powerful styles can be.
If you don't use Word's styles, imagine this scenario:
View a flash demo (Note: unfortunately, at the end of the demo, you'll be sent to a page that no longer exists. Just close the browser window and you'll return here. Until we have a chance to fix it, please accept our apologies.)
You create, say, a footnote and format it to perfection. Position, size, font, color, fill ... any formatting that PowerPoint is capable of. You've got the most beautiful, most perfect footnote known to civilization right there on your slide.
Now ... make another one just like it on the hundred other slides in your presentation. And then reformat the footnotes in all of your other presentations to match this one.
It makes your wrists hurt just thinking about it, right?
But suppose you could somehow memorize all the formatting you gave that first footnote, then select any other shape and apply your footnote formatting. In one click.
ShapeStyles does that for you. But that's just for starters.
Suppose you've just created a new slide and need to add a footnote. With ShapeStyles it's even simpler. Choose the footnote style you saved, click a button and ShapeStyles creates the textbox, formats it and even drops in and selects some sample text. Just start typing the text you want to add.
Ah, but what if you decide later that the footnote formatting is wrong, all wrong? And that now you need to reformat all of those footnotes. Throughout your entire presentation. Does that sound like a perfectly squalid way to waste a day or what?
Well, no. Not if you have ShapeStyles. It'll let you reformat one footnote, replace the old style formatting with the new, then ... here's the part that makes us giggle ... apply the new formatting to every shape in your presentation that had the old footnote formatting. One Click. Boom. Done.
It's not just for footnotes
Not by a long shot. ShapeStyles saves you hours on just about any type of repetitive formatting.
And you can tell it which of those attributes to memorize/apply and which to ignore for each style you define.
It's like this: if you have styles available to you and you don't use them, you're wasting WAY too much of your valuable time. And now PPTools brings styles to PowerPoint.
How ShapeStyles works
ShapeStyles is like a very smart, fast assistant who does all your PowerPoint formatting for you. It clicks all the buttons and chooses all the right options at the speed of light. It doesn't get bored and make mistakes and never asks for a raise.
ShapeStyles can memorize the formatting you've applied to a PowerPoint shape and save it in named styles that you can later apply to other shapes.
To create a new style, you simply
- Choose a PowerPoint shape that's already formatted the way you want it
- Click the Pick Up Style button
- Give the style a name
- Set some options that determine which if the shape's many attributes you want to include in the style
Once you've created the style, it appears with your other styles on the ShapeStyles toolbar.
To apply a style's memorized formatting, select the style, select the shape or shapes you want to apply it to and click Apply Style. Done!
In one click, you've applied dozens of formatting options that might ordinarily be scattered across six or eight tabs in three or four PowerPoint dialog boxes.
And with ShapeStyles Sticky Styles, you can even set your styles up so that when you change the style, you can automatically apply the changes to all of the shapes in your presentation that have that style applied already.
If you want to create styles for others to use but you don't want them to be able to edit your styles, you can set them up with copies of ShapeStyles Lite, which can select and apply styles but not edit them.
For more detailed information, please see ShapeStyles Overview
[Previous] [Home] [Next]