You know the scenario: a slide deck is using an old theme. Or, more likely, it’s made up of multiple themes due to repeated copying-and-pasting from different decks of different provenances.
These days, cleaning up a mess of multiple old themes to make a consistent deck in Google Slides is a lot easier than it used to be, and often fairly quick, but I keep forgetting how to do it, so this is a reminder-to-self.
In the below, “Slide Deck A” is the slide deck being built, that you want to look nice and consistent. “Template Slide Deck” is a clean slide deck containing the theme you want to apply (consistently) to Slide Deck A.
- Ensure that Template Slide Deck has at least one slide. Select it, and take it into the copy buffer (Ctrl-C or equivalent)
- Paste the slide into Slide Deck A, selecting “Keep Original Styles” in the import process. This should pull in the entire theme from Template Slide Deck.
- (Optional) You don’t need Template Slide Deck any more now, so you can delete it if desired.
- Back in Slide Deck A, if not already open, click “Theme” in the top nav bar so that you get a right-hand panel with themes in.
- Select some/all slides in Slide Deck A, right-click and choose “Change Theme”
- In the Themes panel, click “In this presentation” to expand the choice of themes. In there, you should find the “imported” theme from Template Slide Deck. Select it.
- Now the slides you selected should have the “clean” theme, and their original layouts will have been added to the clean theme. However, you’ll probably want to apply a layout from the “clean” template. Right click on the requisite slides -> Apply Layout -> choose one.
- Clean up the individual slide contents as necessary
- If necessary you can remove the “old” theme (it sometimes seems to automatically clean up once no more slides use it)
- Once you’ve migrated all the slides to a “new” layout from the clean template, remove the old layouts which were imported to the new theme (via Theme Builder)