How do I tell PowerPoint to map two placeholders when switching slide layouts?

Question

I start with a working example:

• Open PowerPoint with a blank presentation.
• Right-click the title slide and choose "Layout - Title and Content".
• You see "• Click to add text"? Click and add some text.
• Right-click the slide again and choose "Layout - Two Content".

See how smart PowerPoint can be?

1. The text you entered in the single placeholder before is now in one the of two placeholders.
2. Specifically, the left one.

My questions:

1. Why? (And not in an extra one?)
2. Why? (And not in the right one?)

My questions arises because I have received a set of master slides in which the above is not working, and I am trying to repair it without having to regenerate everything.

Answer 1

This is a site for programming issues, but the background behind this issue might be sufficiently complex. Modern PowerPoint files are XML. In the XML for each slide layout, each placeholder has an idx reference number. PowerPoint uses these on numbers to decide where to place content.

Lazy Designer Syndrome is the cause of what you're seeing. Instead of creating new placeholders in order, so the idx numbers would increment in a logical order, the designer has copied and pasted placeholders to avoid extra formatting work. The pasted placeholders all have the same idx number. As a result, PowerPoint has no idea of placeholder order and inserts content randomly.

This isn't always easy to solve without editing the XML, but you can try deleting all but the leftmost placeholder. Then create new placeholders by inserting them one at a time and reformatting them manually to match the first.