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Do you use placeholders in your PowerPoint files? Or, do you start with a blank slide and add text boxes to hold your content?

Many people are never trained why they are there or why they should use the text holders. Some of this comes from the earlier days of PowerPoint when there was a limit on how many placeholders could be on a slide. Now that you can create your own placeholders (and have been able to for awhile), using placeholders is a habit you should get into. Not using the placeholders to hold your text leads to problems when you want to change the look and feel of a presentation down the line. (There are other kinds of placeholders as well. We’ll talk about them another day.)

What’s a placeholder?

When you first bring up PowerPoint, you are shown a blank slide with two boxes. These boxes have dotted outlines. These boxes are placeholders. Using them allows you to easily format your content the way you want it to look. Type your text into these boxes and they automatically pick up the formatting you have used in your slide masters, layouts, and presentation themes.

Text placeholders contain slide titles, presentation titles and sub-titles, and slide text. Because we used to be limited on what kinds of placeholders were available, some PowerPoint trainers used to recommend you not use them. Now that PowerPoint allows as many placeholders as you want to put on a layout, you should always use them.

What’s the advantage of a placeholder?

Placeholders allow you to worry about content separate from design. By putting your content into a placeholder, it shows up in your outline. You can see at a glance what content is on what slide. You can edit it, refine it, and sculpt it as you want to until it is both succinct and clear.

Because placeholders automatically pick up the font, sizing, color, and other formatting from the slide designs, changing the look and feel of the placeholders on all your slides is a matter of changing the look in one place. When you use text boxes instead, you have to hand format each text box every time you change the look of your presentation.

But I already did the text boxes! Now what?

There are few ways that I know of to take the content of text boxes and get it moved to the placeholders. The hard way is to cut the text from each box and paste it into a placeholder. This is a tedious process that can drive you crazy. But there is a better way. I’ve documented it over on the Office 2010 blog for Symbaloo. Check it out.

While you are at it, check out the web mixes we’ve been creating on Office 2010. There are some really great links there. I know I haven’t found them all. Let me know which ones I have missed!

(Disclosure time: Symbaloo is a client of The Social Media Party, my employer. That’s why I am blogging there. It’s a new way to access web content. Try it, you will like it. Nice and graphical and easy to navigate. I am the community leader for the Office 2010 community over there. Hey, it’s getting me back into my community roots: OneNote and PowerPoint is where I started, after all.)

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What do you do when the latest geek gadget isn’t something you need, but is something you would like to write about? You borrow one, of course!

• The gadget in question: An iPad

• Loaned to me by: Symbaloo

Full disclosure time:

Symbaloo is a sister company and client of The Social Media Party, my current employer. That said, I fell in love with Symbaloo on first introduction. I love the concept of the mixes and the implementation. Sharing content from the web just got a lot easier for US netizens. Join me and try it out!

My thoughts

I had use of the iPad for a week. I loved some of it, hated other parts of it. The things that impacted me the most?

What I loved: Symbaloo 2.0 on the iPad

Symbaloo 2.0 allowed me to navigate the web in a natural, consistent, and convenient way. Symbaloo is a site new to the US. They allow you to create landing pages (called mixes) created of tiles. Each tile is linked to another piece of information on the web, such as:

• Web pages

• News or RSS feeds

• Widgets

• Other mixes

Want to learn how easy it is to use Symbaloo 2.0? Kimmie Chann, Symbaloo’s Community Director for the US, has posted a series of videos on how to use it. Check out this one on “How to Edit and Search for Webmixes”:

How to edit and search for webmixes on Symbaloo

Symbaloo 2.0 wasn’t created for the iPad. It just happens that it works there amazingly well. See for yourself!

Symbaloo 2.0 on the iPad

I also found Symbaloo 2.0 a great way to access my feeds through my iPad. I didn’t like any of the free RSS readers I saw in the apps list. Symbaloo 2.0 let me get to the feed content without hassles or expense. I created an RSS tile for the feeds I wanted to read on the iPad and saved the mix. Voila – My own RSS reader!

Symbaloo Mix for Social Media Feeds

See those feeds live via Symbaloo 2.0!

Clicking a link inside one of those tiles gets you to the linked post. Clicking the box itself usually takes you to the home page for the feed. I say usually because some of the feeds are set up to take you to a page where you can auto subscribe. That’s a feature of the feed settings, not Symbaloo 2.0.

Because Symbaloo 2.0 is all tile based, it was easy for me to navigate without typing. Since typing was the one thing that really bugged me on the iPad, finding that Symbaloo 2.0 worked so well was a definite good thing.

I won’t go so far as to say that I would buy an iPad to use Symbaloo 2.0 on it. I might think about it with a 3G iPad, since that would give me anywhere access. What I will say is that after this week of using the iPad, if someone offered me one – I’d keep it. Until then, I will keep using Symbaloo 2.0 on my desktop and my tablet and leave the iPads to the rest of you.