If you think it’s a little stupid, well yeah, it is a little bit! The Frustration My Designer Experienced If you find this confusing, that’s because it is. So, if you are copying and pasting between different PowerPoint presentations, yes, the text will update to reflect and respect the design of the destination template or theme. Now that we understand where those formatting options come from for a text box, now understand that every time you paste text into a text box (not a placeholder…that is different) PowerPoint, by default, will reformat the pasted text to look like whatever text should look like according to the default theme rather than the default text box. Yes, you can change how the default text box is formatted per presentation or per template! Just draw a text box, format it as you would like it to appear, then right-click on the text box, and choose the option, “Set as the Default Text Box.” Now, every time you draw a new text box, the new formatting options will be the default. I’m not going to get too technical with this, but every time you add a new text box to PowerPoint, PowerPoint will draw that text box according to those design specifications saved with that theme.

The Default Text Box in PowerPointĮvery presentation template in PowerPoint, even the “blank” presentation template, has a pre-formatted text box associated with that template or theme. But we before we dive into the specifics about his copy and paste situation, you need to understand how PowerPoint’s default text boxes behave, formatting-wise.

Is this a design flaw, a user error, or is copying and pasting really just a more difficult thing than we realize? Who knows? I do I do! It’s all of the above!Įarlier today, one of the designers at Pluralsight (a brilliant and talented designer, by the way, skilled across a wide variety of tools and platforms) had trouble copying and pasting some text into a PowerPoint text box, and asked me for some help. How hard can this be, really? Well, honestly, quite hard and time consuming even for pros and power-users of Office.

How to keep source formatting in word