Guide to Creating a Slide Library in PowerPoint

Key Takeaways:

• A well-organized slide library is essential to improve the visual consistency of corporate presentations. When effectively organized and managed, it ensures slides adhere to brand guidelines, avoiding inconsistent styles and formatting. Visual consistency strengthens the corporate identity and helps the audience focus on the message being conveyed.

• The MLC PowerPoint Add-in is a valuable tool for centralizing and automating template management through a dedicated slide library. With advanced features like thematic folder organization and customizable tags, it makes finding and using the right slides at the right time much easier. Additionally, it offers many other features to simplify and speed up presentation creation, ensuring a professional result every time.

• Sharing the library with your team through the slide library’s features ensures consistent access to updated materials and enhances collaboration. Assigning personalized permissions, such as viewing or editing folders, eliminates confusion and duplication, enabling each team member to work effectively with the same tools and templates.

Organize Your Templates and Enhance Corporate Communication with MLC PowerPoint Add-in

Have you ever attended a corporate presentation where the slides looked like they came from completely different worlds? One slide using corporate colors, another with strange fonts, and a third with a layout that seemed improvised. Even if the speaker was brilliant (and they may well have been), the overall impression was one of cosmic chaos.

When visual consistency falls short, the audience gets distracted, the message loses its impact, and, worst of all, the brand’s image ends up looking more like an abstract art piece (the kind nobody understands).

PowerPoint templates are designed to prevent such situations. They are the tool that turns a collection of slides into a presentation that speaks with a unified voice. But managing them, especially within a team, can be challenging. Old versions circulating, slides edited without control, and materials scattered in folders more hidden than Blackbeard’s treasure make consistency hard to maintain.

If this sounds familiar, I have a solution for you: how about creating a dedicated slide library?

“What do you mean, Maurizio?”

I mean creating a dedicated space, a centralized archive where you can save, organize, and manage all your corporate slides and templates in an orderly way, easily accessible to you and your colleagues.

Doesn’t that sound amazing?

And the best part is that with our MLC PowerPoint Add-in, you can make it happen in no time!

I’ll explain everything in this article.

MLC PowerPoint Add-in: Your Ally for Flawless Slides

The ideal tool for creating your slide library without stress is our MLC PowerPoint Add-in.

If you’re a regular reader of our blog, you’ve probably heard about it multiple times. You may have even downloaded it and used it for a while to speed up the creation of effective presentations with impact. If so, let me say: great choice!

If not, though, a brief overview of the tool wouldn’t hurt.

Our PowerPoint plugin is designed to simplify your work with presentations by automating repetitive tasks and offering advanced tools to manage templates, slides, and every other aspect.

In addition to the feature dedicated to creating slide libraries, MLC PowerPoint Add-in includes:

• alignment and formatting tools for perfect slides;
• access to graphic resources such as HD images, SVG icons, and predefined layouts;
• tools to speed up design work, such as automatic resizing of elements;
• and much more that I won’t detail here because it would take pages upon pages of text to describe it all!

But today, we’ll focus on the feature that truly changes the game for anyone working with corporate templates: the slide library.

Read also: Everything you need to know about the effective use of connectors on PowerPoint

How to Create a Slide Library for Consistent and Effective Presentations

Okay, you’ve installed the MLC PowerPoint Add-in, and you’re ready to create your slide library.

Let’s get started!

First, gather the materials that best represent your brand. Focus on:

• evergreen introductory slides that you can reuse in multiple projects, like the example below showing basic information about my books and training courses;

• standard layouts for corporate presentations;
• templates for business proposals;
• predefined formats for reports or analyses.

Make sure every slide is updated and follows your brand’s visual guidelines. This will be the core of your library.

Now, let’s upload them to your slide library. This way, whenever these slides are used in any other presentation, they will be utilized consistently, regardless of the project or person.

Access the Graphic Library panel in the MLC PowerPoint Add-in.

Click on the My Slides tab.

Here, you can start building the structure of your library by creating thematic folders. For example:

• a Corporate Presentations folder for introductory slides and generic company descriptions;
• a Business Proposals folder with templates for offers and pitches;
• an Internal Training section for slides used in courses and internal presentations.

To create a new folder, right-click within My Slides and select Create Folder.

Assign a descriptive name to the folder, and you’re ready to organize it. In the example below, I decided to create a new folder called New Folder Training.

Once the folders are defined, it’s time to fill them. Open a presentation that contains a slide you want to add, select the slide, and upload it to the corresponding folder. To do this, select it, right-click the folder, and choose Add Selected Slides.

Et voilà: the slides uploaded to the library will always be available for reuse, without having to search through old files or worry about using outdated versions. With a single click, you can insert your chosen slide directly into your presentations!

Use Tags to Make Everything More Accessible and Share Your Folders with a Click!

As your library grows, finding a specific slide might become challenging—very challenging, like looking for a lost sock in the dryer after laundry day!

This is where tags come into play—magical labels for your slides. Assign keywords to each slide to describe its content.

For example:

• a slide on training courses could have tags like “training,” “resources,” or “HR”;
• a business proposal template might be tagged with “sales” or “offers.”

Let’s go through this step together.

Simply right-click the slide you want to tag and define the tag in the window you see below. Here, I’ve decided to use the tag “trainings.”

And that’s it!

This way, when searching for a specific slide, all you need to do is type the tag into the search bar, and the plugin will find it for you. It’s like having an internal search engine for your library!

But beyond everything I’ve explained so far, the real power of a slide library is evident when you share it with your team. With MLC PowerPoint Add-in, you can allow your colleagues to access the library, assigning them specific permissions.

Here’s how to proceed.

Right-click inside the folder you want to share and select Edit Folder.

A small window will appear where you need to check the box I want to share this folder.

Then, search for the user(s) you want to share the folder with by typing their name in the box. In my case, I decided to grant access to the New Training folder to Sara, our training manager.

As you can see in the image below, you can choose whether to grant view-only permissions or allow editing of the folder, should you want your colleagues to contribute.

This ensures everyone works with the same materials, avoiding errors, duplications, and, most importantly, endless arguments over which templates are “better”…

Read also: What makes presentations engaging and how you can do it too

Smarter Management for More Effective Communication

Visual consistency is key to presentations that make an impact, and a well-organized slide library is your ace up your sleeve, your secret weapon, your… well, you get the idea.

With MLC PowerPoint Add-in, you can create a centralized system to manage your templates, saving valuable time, improving the quality of your work, and, above all, avoiding turning your desk into a landfill of sticky notes.

Now that you know how to tame the slide jungle, it’s time to act!

Gather your best templates and slides that align with the message you want to convey, upload everything to the library, and share it with your team. Not only will you simplify your work life, but you’ll also ensure every presentation shines brightly, with a clear and professional voice.

Good luck, and may the slides always work in your favor!

Don’t forget to share your experience with me in the comments below. I can’t wait to hear how you’ve made your presentations even more powerful and effective!

How to Create a Slide Library in PowerPoint: FAQ

Why is it important to maintain good visual and communicative consistency in corporate presentations?

Maintaining good visual and communicative consistency in corporate presentations is essential to strengthen brand identity, improve message understanding, and leave a professional impression on the audience.

How can you organize presentation materials to maintain high visual and communicative consistency?

To maintain high visual and communicative consistency, it is advisable to create a centralized slide library, organize slides into thematic folders, update templates in line with brand guidelines, and use tools like MLC PowerPoint Add-in to simplify management.

What are the benefits of MLC PowerPoint Add-in?

MLC PowerPoint Add-in offers numerous benefits, including centralizing slide management, organizing materials intuitively, speeding up work with advanced design tools, and improving team collaboration by sharing folders and templates.