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Creating Template Slides in Microsoft PowerPoint

The first step is to create slides in Microsoft PowerPoint. These slides consist of one style slide and multiple component slides, as shown in Figure 25.

Figure 25. PowerPoint Slides That Can Make Up a Presentation Template

The components shown in Figure 25 are only examples. You could have other components, such as a table of contents or a set of collateral, and you could omit the quotes or product descriptions. However, a template must have a presentation background slide and one or more component slides.

NOTE:  See Release Notes on Siebel SupportWeb for information about which versions of Microsoft PowerPoint are supported.

NOTE:  Presentations can only use fields from one business object. If you want to include additional fields, you must use Siebel Tools to add the business components that include these fields to the business object that is the basis of the presentation.

To create the template slides, you go through the following stages:

• Planning the template. Decide what components the template should have.
• Creating the style slide. Create the slide that gives all the template components a standard formatting.
• Creating the component slides. Create a slide for each component of the template.

These tasks are a step in Process of Creating Presentation Templates.

Planning the Presentation Template

Before you create the slides in PowerPoint, you must determine how the presentation should look and what type of information it should contain. Begin by looking at previous successful presentations to see what sections they contained. For example, did they all contain an agenda, an executive overview slide, and a product summary slide? Next, look to see what current slides you have on hand, and what customer questions these pieces answer. Then decide how to organize your information. What topics could be standard across all presentations? What topics are specific to certain presentations? What is the best order for the pieces in the presentation you are creating? Finally, decide what fields to insert to customize their presentations (for example, contact name, account name, industry). You will use this information to create bookmarks in your PowerPoint slides.

Creating a Presentation Background Slide

After you plan your templates, work on the presentation background slide for this template, which is the slide that serves as your title slide and also specifies the background layout and formatting of the entire presentation. This background slide may contain your company logo, special colors and background designs, and headers and footers.

NOTE:  The following procedure may vary slightly, depending on your version of Microsoft PowerPoint.

To set up styles for your presentation template

1. Create a new slide in Microsoft PowerPoint.
2. Since this slide will also serve as your title slide, you may want to select the title slide layout template and enter the title of the presentation.
3. Select the background colors and font size.
4. Choose View > Header and Footer, and create and apply a header and a footer for your template.
5. Switch to the Master Slide view, and select formatting options that will apply to your whole presentation.
6. Close the Master Slide view, and return to the Slide view (choose View > Slide).
7. Save the file:
   • Choose a name that uses only alphanumeric characters.
   • Use the .ppt extension for PowerPoint.
8. Close the file.

Creating Presentation Template Components

The next step in developing your template is to create components, the slides that make up the body of your presentation.

A component is the Siebel Presentations term for a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation that includes standard text and personalized data.

To create a component, you type the standard text and then create bookmarks, or Microsoft PowerPoint placeholders for custom data. When a salesperson generates a presentation, these bookmarks will be replaced with data from the Siebel application.

NOTE:  The following procedure may vary slightly, depending on your version of Microsoft PowerPoint.

To create a component with bookmarks

1. Create a new slide in Microsoft PowerPoint.
2. Type the standard text, pictures, bulleted information, and so on that belongs in this component.
3. Place the cursor where you want to create a bookmark.
4. Enter the following text:

   [["name of bookmark"]]

   For example, to create a bookmark for the company name, type:

   [[Company]]

5. Write down the name of the bookmark, because you will need it later when you map the bookmark to a Siebel field name.
6. Repeat Step 3 through Step 5 for every bookmark you want to insert.

   NOTE:  If the same field is being inserted in several places, you can copy its bookmark and paste it into other parts of the document.

7. Save the component slide as a PPT file.