To make a custom PowerPoint template with your own custom branding any layout, you need to create a file that is compatible with FlowShare. You have two options:

1. Start PowerPoint and open the template (with POTX file extension) that you want to make compatible and use within FlowShare.

2. Open the ‘View’ menu item at the top and select the ‘Slide Master’ icon.

3. From the Slide Master only the first 2 layouts are used, one for the Cover/Title page and the other is for the Slides.

3. On the Slide Master layouts, FlowShare needs different placeholders for images, description texts, headlines and so. These placeholders need to be named correctly so that FlowShare can assign them properly for various elements (title, text, picture, etc).

These are the object names that can be used inside a custom template:

On Cover layout page:

On Slides layout page:

1. Click on the ‘Shape Format’ menu that appears only after selecting a placeholder item on the slide.

2. Click on ‘Selection Pane…’ option.

3. If you double-click on the object name, you can rename it. Select the item that will be used for displaying the captured screenshot images, texts, etc.

4. This placeholder will contain the images from your Flow. Change the name of the object to ‘fs-picture’ (without quotes). Confirm your input by pressing the Enter key.

5. Double-click the object you want FlowShare to use for captions. This placholder will display the (optional) section headlines. Change the name of the object to 'fs-title' (without quotation marks). Confirm your input by pressing the Enter key.

6. Double-click on the object you want FlowShare to use for your description texts.

This placeholder will contain all the texts that you enter to a slide. Change the name of the object to 'fs-text' (without quotation marks). Confirm your input by pressing the Enter key.

7. In FlowShare 3.0 we introduced a new placholder called fs-only-text that you can use alternatively to display texts if there is no image on a slide. This placeholder can be full width so the full slide is utilized for the texts.

So if you insert both fs-text and fs-only-text then during rendering we pick one or the other depending if there is an image on a slide or not.

Pro tip! If you know you will have more text-heavy slides without images, you can even configure your fs-only-text placeholder in a way, that the texts will be displayed in 2-columns.

8. When you specify the placeholder on the Cover/Title page, it will contain the title of your Flow. Name it 'fs-title' (without quotation marks) for the title of the document.

9. Add the 'fs-author' (without quotation marks) for the author’s name placeholder.

10. You can add also the 'fs-affiliation' (without quotation marks) for the company/department placeholder.

Click on the ‘File’ tab, select “Save as” and Browse your desired destination.

Open the ‘File type’ dropdow and select ‘PowerPoint template (*.potx). This will create a template and not a normal pptx presentation.

1. Click on the Export button in the FlowShare menu

2. Select the PPTX format.

3. Click the ” Add template” button to add your own template.

4. Now in File Explorer select your template. Only files in .potx format are allowed.
Click on the “Open” button.

5. You have imported your PowerPoint template into FlowShare!

6. Your template is now available for selection in the thumbnail view. Click on the Export button if you want to export.