Can a text box be duplicated across slides and edited in one place in PowerPoint?

Question

I have a Powerpoint Presentation with some animations on one of my slides. Since i want to distribute the presentation in a PDF, I need to instead make a separate slide for each part of the animation and click through them, otherwise all of the images in the animation will overlap in the PDF.

Well, this is easy enough to do, but the issue is that I go from having 1 slide to having 4 slides with identical text. As I update the presentation, I don't want to have to remember to edit the text in 4 slides.

I know I could create a master slide, but then to edit that specific slide, I have to remember to go through the menus to access the master slide, which is kind of tedious.

Is there anyway to have a text box on slide 1, copy it to slide 2, 3, and 4; and be able to edit this text on any of the slides and have the changes reflected on all fo the text boxes? I feel like this should be fairly straightforward since it is similar to a "header" in a word document.

Answer 1

It is probably a better to use this: Export PowerPoint to PDF with each animation on a separate slide There is a tool there referenced called PPSplit, it even works (despite error messages) in Powerpoint 2013.

Here is also a link directly to the tool PPSplit: PPSplit

Answer 2

There are two approaches to solving this problem that I know of. Both require a paid PDF editor (or free trial of one) such as Adobe Acrobat DC or Foxit PhantomPDF (I work for Foxit, incidentally).

1. Create a header/footer, as you stated in your question. This would require some tweaking to get the text to appear exactly where you wanted; you would have to adjust the top/bottom margin for vertical placement, and add leading/trailing spaces to the header/footer text to achieve the desired horizontal placement.

This can be done in Acrobat DC by clicking on the "Edit PDF" tool and then "Header & Footer", and an PhantomPDF by clicking on "Header&Footer" in the "Organize" tab. You would use "Add" for the initial placement and "Update" to adjust the placement or text.

2. If you create form fields that have the same name, each will automatically adjust to reflect edits made to any of the fields. Thus, you can use text boxes to achieve the desired effect. Here's how you would do it in PhantomPDF, since I know more about it - but you could do it in any PDF editor that supports editing form fields:

   • Go to the Form tab and click on "Text Field"
   • Add text fields to the desired location of the text on each page
   • For each field, right-click on it and select "Properties". Under the "General" tab, type in the same name for each field under "Name". Optionally, you can adjust the font under the "Appearance" tab.

Now, every change you make to the text in one field should propagate to the other fields.