Cleaning a 140-Slide Deck Assembled from Three Agencies
Your team must clean up a 140-slide investor deck assembled from three agency templates. Symptoms: heading fonts switch between two serif faces from slide to slide; body text is sometimes 14-point Calibri and sometimes 14-point Arial; 22 slides have full-bleed photos inserted directly on the slide rather than in the master; 18 title placeholders were replaced with plain text boxes; the new corporate master has been applied, but about 60 legacy slides still show the old background and logo; the file is 180 MB and takes 40 seconds to open; a colleague on a Mac reports that some text reflows and overflows its boxes. The deadline is five days, and the deck will be projected on a 16:9 screen and distributed as a PDF.
1. Sequence the cleanup and justify the order. Include what you would do before touching any slide.
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Before editing, save a frozen copy and open a duplicate working file. Then inventory: count slides by source deck, list every font, list every slide with a full-bleed picture, and list every title that is a text box. This prevents fixing the same problem twice.
Order: first, set theme fonts and theme colors, because they cascade to every slide using theme formatting and will move text. Second, repair the slide master and layouts: background, logo position, title and body placeholders, footer, slide numbers. Third, reattach the 18 text-box titles to title placeholders so outline view, accessibility, and layout resets work. Fourth, normalize the 60 legacy slides that still show the old background and logo, using layout reapplication rather than manual fixes where possible. Fifth, handle the 22 full-bleed photos. Sixth, compress images and remove unused media. Last, export the PDF and test both the projected file and the PDF on a second machine.
Do not compress media first: you may degrade images that later need to be recropped or repositioned. Do font and layout work first because those changes alter text flow and box sizes.
2. Decide what belongs in the master and layouts versus what should stay on individual slides, including the 22 full-bleed photos.
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Master and layouts should carry everything repeated: background, logo, title and body fonts and sizes, color theme, footer, slide numbers, and the standard content arrangements. Build layouts for title, section break, one-column content, two-column content, full-bleed image, and image-plus-text. That gives editors a correct default instead of manually recreating the same arrangement.
The 22 full-bleed photos are a judgment call. If several slides reuse the same image as a section background, put it on a dedicated layout or on the master for that section. If each photo is unique, keep it on the individual slide but place it through a picture placeholder on a full-bleed layout so it is cropped, positioned, and replaced consistently. Do not put 22 different photos on the master; that creates a maintenance problem and makes the master unusable for other decks.
The 18 plain text boxes should become title placeholders, not just look like titles. Placeholders feed outline view, accessibility reading order, and PDF tags. For the legacy slides, reapply the correct layout and use Reset to restore placeholder geometry, then re-enter any text that was manually positioned.
3. Diagnose the Mac text reflow and the 180 MB file size, and propose concrete fixes for both.
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Reflow is almost certainly a font substitution problem. Theme fonts may reference faces that are not installed on the Mac, so the Mac substitutes a different face with different metrics, and text set to fixed boxes overflows. Check the theme font settings, replace both serif faces with fonts that exist on Windows and macOS, and test the working file on a Mac before the deadline. If the deck must keep a nonstandard font, embed fonts on Windows, but treat embedding as a fallback because it is not equally supported everywhere. Also turn on autofit or leave 10–15% slack in every box, and avoid fixed-size boxes for long headings.
File size is likely images. Use picture compression at 150 ppi for projection and around 220 ppi for print, and apply it only to pictures that do not need to be zoomed. Remove cropped areas of pictures. Delete unused masters, layouts, and off-slide objects left over from the agency decks. Check for embedded video or audio. Save a new file after compression rather than repeatedly saving over the old one. Then export the PDF and compare its size; if the PDF is still large, check the export resolution setting.