How to Check a PowerPoint Against Your Template (Brand Compliance Checklist)

To check a PowerPoint against your template, compare the file's structure with the approved master rather than its appearance. In about ten minutes you can do it with built-in tools: Slide Master view for foreign masters, the theme colour and font settings, Replace Fonts for fonts in use, the Selection Pane for free text boxes and hidden objects, Reset for local overrides, and the Accessibility Checker for missing titles and alt text. The checklist and severity table below tell you what each finding means and what to fix first.

The reason to check structure is simple. A slide can look on brand and still be broken. A heading retyped in a free text box, a blue that is one shade off the theme colour, or a slide pasted with its source master all look fine on screen. They break when the template is updated, when the deck is reused, or when a screen reader opens the file.

The fastest first step is automatic. Drop the deck into offgen's free PowerPoint template checker and get every finding listed by slide in one report, without uploading the file. Then use the manual steps below to understand and fix what it found.

What "on template" actually means

A deck follows the template when its content inherits from the approved master instead of imitating it. In practice that means five things:

1. One approved master. Every slide uses a layout from the current master, with no second master brought in by copied slides.
2. Theme fonts and colours. Text and shapes reference the theme's heading and body fonts and its colour slots, rather than fonts and RGB values set locally.
3. Placeholders, not text boxes. Titles and body text sit in layout placeholders, so a master update moves and restyles them.
4. Readable sizes. Text stays above a minimum size the brand allows, typically excluding only legal small print.
5. Accessible structure. Every slide has a title, and pictures have alternative text.

Microsoft describes the slide master as the place where you define fonts, images such as logos and layouts once, so that every slide based on it inherits the change (Microsoft Support: What is a slide master). A compliance check is therefore a check of inheritance.

The 10-minute manual check

Work through these steps in order on a copy of the deck. Menu paths are for PowerPoint for Microsoft 365 on Windows; differences on other platforms are noted where Microsoft documents them.

Minute 1: count the masters

Go to View > Slide Master. The slide master is the larger thumbnail at the top of the left pane, with its layouts indented beneath it (Microsoft Support). Scroll the whole pane.

• A second master, often named after another template or "Custom Design", means slides were pasted with their source formatting.
• Layouts you do not recognise, or several near-identical title layouts, point to the same problem.

Note the master names. You will need them when you fix the deck.

Minutes 2 to 3: compare theme colours and fonts

On the Design tab, open the Variants gallery with the down arrow, then select Colors > Customize Colors. Microsoft explains that theme colours consist of four text and background colours, six accent colours and two hyperlink colours (Microsoft Support: Create your own theme). Compare each slot with the hex values in your brand specification. Close the dialog without saving.

For fonts, go to View > Slide Master, then Slide Master > Fonts. The highlighted entry shows the heading and body fonts of the theme (Microsoft Support: Change the fonts).

If these values differ from the brand specification, the problem is the template itself, not the author. Stop and fix the master first.

Minute 4: list the fonts in use

Go to Home > Replace > Replace Fonts (in the Editing group). The Replace list shows the fonts used in the presentation. Every font other than the two theme fonts is a finding. The same dialog can swap a font throughout the deck, although Microsoft notes that the feature is not available in PowerPoint for the web and that decks with several masters need each master changed separately (Microsoft Support).

Be careful with Replace Fonts as a fix. It replaces a font with another named font, which is still a local setting. The cleaner fix for body text is Reset, described below.

Minutes 5 to 6: inspect objects with the Selection Pane

Open Home > Select > Selection Pane, or press Alt+F10 (Microsoft Support: Selection pane). Walk through the slides that matter most: title, executive summary, key charts.

• Default object names usually reveal the type. Titles and content placeholders carry names such as "Title 1" or "Content Placeholder 2"; a free text box is typically named "TextBox" followed by a number. Renamed objects need a click to confirm.
• Look for hidden objects (the eye icon). Hidden content still travels with the file.
• Look for objects you cannot see on the slide. Zoom out and check the grey area around the slide for shapes parked outside the visible area.

Minute 7: reset suspicious slides

Select a slide that looks slightly off and choose Home > Reset (Slides group). Microsoft states that Reset reverts layout changes and does not delete content you have added (Microsoft Support: Apply a slide layout), and that formatting such as fonts, colours and effects goes back to what the template assigns (Microsoft Support: Accessibility).

Reset is also a diagnostic. If a slide visibly jumps when you reset it, it contained local overrides. If you prefer the overridden look, that is a signal to change the template, not to keep the override. Use Ctrl+Z to undo while you are only inspecting.

Reset only affects placeholders. Free text boxes stay where they are, which makes them easy to spot after a reset.

Minute 8: run the Accessibility Checker

Select Review > Check Accessibility (Microsoft Support). Microsoft's rules classify missing alternative text and slides without titles as errors, reading order as a warning and duplicate slide titles as a tip (Microsoft Support: Rules for the Accessibility Checker).

A missing title often has a template cause: the author used a blank layout and typed a heading into a text box. Fixing the layout fixes both the brand and the accessibility finding.

Minutes 9 to 10: check font sizes and fix with the right tool

PowerPoint has no built-in report of font sizes, which is why the template checker flags every size below 10 pt for you. To spot-check by hand, look at footnotes, chart labels and table text by selecting them and reading the size on the Home tab. Microsoft's accessibility guidance recommends 18 pt or larger for presentation text (Microsoft Support); many corporate templates allow smaller sizes for sources and legal text, so check against your own brand floor.

For individual fixes, Format Painter on the Home tab copies formatting from a correct object to an incorrect one. A single click applies it once, a double click keeps it active for several objects, and Esc stops it (Microsoft Support: Format Painter). It copies local formatting, so prefer Reset or moving text into a placeholder where possible.

What each finding means

The last row deserves attention in confidential work. Microsoft even suggests positioning a title off the slide so that screen readers still find it (Microsoft Support). Content placed outside the visible area is not removed. A note from an earlier client version parked off the slide goes wherever the file goes.

Severity: what to fix first

Not every finding deserves the same effort before a deadline. This is a practical ranking for decks that leave the organisation.

Adjust the ranking to your context. For a regulated document, a missing disclaimer belongs in the blocking row; for an internal working session, most medium findings can wait.

The checklist

Faster: the free offgen template checker

The manual check works, but it relies on clicking through every slide, and some findings (hard-coded colours in particular) are hard to see by eye. offgen's free PowerPoint template checker automates the same categories. It runs locally in your browser: the file is analysed on your device and is not uploaded.

The checker reads the .pptx file itself rather than a rendering and reports:

• fonts that are not part of the theme;
• hard-coded colours outside the theme colour slots;
• text placed outside placeholders;
• font sizes below 10 pt;
• pictures without alt text;
• missing slide titles;
• shapes partly or fully outside the slide bounds;
• multiple masters and unused masters or layouts;
• optionally, differences against a reference template you load alongside the deck.

Findings name the affected slide and, where it applies, the object as it is named in the Selection Pane, so you can jump straight to it. The result is summarised as a score from 0 to 100, and the findings can be exported as CSV for the template owner or a review log.

The checker reads the file; judgement stays with your reviewers. Whether a chart is correct or a logo is the current version for a given market is their call. Approved wording and logos are exactly what offgen lockable elements take off their list, because offgen reproduces locked content exactly in every deck it creates.

Prevent instead of check

A check finds defects after they exist. The more reliable approach is to make the defects hard to create in the first place.

• Put fixed elements on the master. Logos, legal notices and page numbers placed on the master or layouts cannot be accidentally edited in Normal view, as Microsoft notes (Microsoft Support). The guide to locking a PowerPoint slide master covers every native method and what each does not prevent.
• Give authors a better source than old decks. Most foreign masters arrive through copied slides. A maintained library of approved slides removes the reason to copy; see consulting slide library best practices.
• Govern generation, not only review. If slides are created by an AI tool, the tool should fill your placeholders with native objects rather than drawing new boxes on top. offgen editable templates work exactly this way. The article on editable AI PowerPoint output explains what to test in any tool.

The wider operating model, including who owns exceptions and what to measure, is in the PowerPoint brand governance guide.

Never run this check again with offgen brand governance

The checker tells you what went wrong. offgen makes sure it does not go wrong: teams and AI agents create presentations directly from your approved master, and offgen catches the findings from the table above before a deck is exported.

• Your master becomes the rulebook. offgen reads typography, colours, spacing, bullet styles and layout rules from the approved master and applies them to every generated slide.
• Text lands in the right placeholder. offgen fills your existing layouts with native, editable objects instead of layering text boxes on top, so the next master update reaches every slide.
• Deviations stop before export. With brand governance you decide which issues block generation, which raise a warning and which offgen corrects automatically.
• Approved content stays fixed. Lockable elements keep logos, legal notices, disclaimers and complete slides exactly as signed off.

Cross Consult, a Munich consultancy with six sites, had offgen load its master and brand rules. One master workflow now replaces six location decks. Senior Consultant Dr. Tanja Haupt named the gap it closed: "There are lots of great tools that create beautiful presentations, but unfortunately not in our CI." Read the Cross Consult story.

Manual edits after export follow PowerPoint's own rules, and the free checker stays your quick final pass for those. The consulting industry page shows how firms hold one standard across every practice.

This article was written by Robin Mattis, offgen's CTO, who leads the architecture behind offgen's PowerPoint-native platform.