Cross-platform consistency

As people work more frequently from home, my clients are beginning to feel the need to work together on a collaborative platform. Some have adopted PowerPoint’s online features, but it seems more often they are getting interested in Google Slides, which is generally more friendly to simultaneous editing by two or more users. The first step in making the move to GSlides is establishing a shared template, and unfortunately there’s more to that than uploading an existing one from PowerPoint.

To generate a working GSlides template, a lot of the same work that goes into making one in PowerPoint has to be repeated. And I mean meticulously.

Some of the work is automatic. GSlides imports color palettes without trouble. If you have been working with a commonly available font like Arial, that will come over as well. But some things won’t work — automatically updating dates will not transfer, for example. And any graphs you have embedded in your presentation will have to be re-created from scratch.

Text placeholders will have to be inspected carefully on the master and layouts: I have seen line spacing change unexpectedly, and title boxes exchanged for ordinary textboxes. Wrinkles like this have to be ironed out before the GSlides template is ready for general use.

PowerPoint templates can be translated to Keynote and InDesign as well. In Keynote, you will encounter issues similar to those described above. InDesign is another story: There’s no porting of placeholders and elements — everything has to be re-done. Bullet levels must be treated as paragraph styles in text placeholders, background images have to be put in manually, and a new color palette has to be created (be careful about that). But in the end, it is possible to end up with an InDesign presentation template identical to one prepared in PowerPoint.

PowerPoint, meet GSlides. GSslides, PowerPoint.