Restyle a deck
You have a new PowerPoint master and a drawer of old presentations. Restyling moves each old deck onto the new design: every slide lands on the best-fitting layout, your words carry across word for word, and what comes back is a real .pptx with every text box still editable in PowerPoint.
What it is for
A rebrand, an acquisition, or a new master template usually means somebody rebuilding the back catalog by hand, one slide at a time. This is the Job that does that part. It is the only flow in the platform that starts from work you already own rather than from a brief, which is why it is worth running on your oldest decks first: the ones nobody will rebuild because rebuilding them costs more than they are worth.
It is deliberately not a one-click conversion. Every deck stops for your approval on a screen that shows exactly what it intends to do, because a wrong layout on slide 3 of a client-facing deck is far more expensive than the minute it takes to check.
Step 1. Train the new master, once
Restyling needs a design to restyle INTO, and that is an ordinary template you train on Train, from your new PowerPoint master. You only ever do this once per master.
Drop the master in on Train (.pptx, .potx and .ppsx are all read) and name what it makes. Training reads the file's own XML rather than a picture of it, so every position, type size and color is exact.
A multi-slide master trains as a LAYOUT LIBRARY, not as one design with fields to fill. Every slide becomes a pattern available for new work, grouped by the deck's own PowerPoint sections: Front Covers, Key Stats, Content Layouts, whatever your designer called them.
Sections named for people rather than for patterns are trained but never picked. A How to Use or Typesetting section stays visible and is left out of the matching, because a page that teaches humans how to use the template is not a pattern for new work. The template says so on its own card.
A large master takes longer than an ordinary template: a 97-slide deck runs about ten minutes. The card narrates its real progress while it works (Reading page 30 of 97), and the build belongs to the server, so you can close the tab.
You can tell a library apart on the Train shelf at a glance: instead of counting fields to fill, its card names the object, as in 97 slides, 12 sections, a layout library.
Step 2. Point it at an old deck
The old presentation goes into your Gallery like any other material, and then there are two ways to start. Both run the same Job and both stop at the same review.
First, bring the old deck in: drag the .pptx onto your Gallery, or add it from a connected file app. A PDF of a deck works too, and so does a Word document, which is split into slides at its own headings.
From the template: open Train and press Restyle a deck on the library's card. Pick the old presentation from the list of everything restylable in your workspace, and the run starts with the template side already answered.
Or from the Job: run the library's own Make Job the way you run any other, and choose the old deck as its source. When the source reads as slides and the template is a library, the run restyles rather than filling one page.
Either way nothing is produced and nothing is spent until you approve the mapping on the next screen.
One deck is one run. A dozen old decks is a dozen runs, each with its own review, on purpose: the review is the control the whole Job exists to give.
Step 3. Check the mapping, then approve
The run pauses and shows you its plan: one row per slide of your old deck, your slide on the left and the layout it will be rebuilt on to the right, with the reason underneath.
Every slide is classified by what it structurally IS, not by what it says: a cover, an agenda, a divider, a stats slide, a quote, a team page, a client wall, a timeline, a process, or ordinary content. Each one is matched into your template's own sections, and repeated content slides rotate through the variants so a long deck does not repeat one layout forty times.
Disagree with any row? Click the layout on the right and the whole library opens, grouped by section, to pick from. The row updates in place.
The two pickers at the top change the pair itself. Point the same old deck at a different template, or the same template at a different deck, and the mapping is worked out again from scratch.
Press Approve and produce. Your copy is placed word for word: the title onto the headline, the rest down the layout in order, with anything that overruns joining the last text box on its own lines rather than being cut. Content pictures come across onto picture slots, and your logo is never overwritten.
Fields the layout has and your slide did not fill are left EMPTY rather than padded with the template's example copy, so a thin slide reads as thin instead of as somebody else's words.
Step 4. Compare it, then take the PowerPoint
When the produce lands you get a side-by-side: your original slide on the left, the restyled one on the right, all the way down.
Each row says what happened to it, and carries a comment box. A comment edits exactly that slide and nothing else, so fixing slide 14 cannot disturb slide 13.
The comparison is kept. Reopen the run from your Activity panel any time later and it lands straight back on the side-by-side rather than making you rebuild the context.
Download it as Slides (PPTX) and you get a NATIVE PowerPoint file built from your template's own slides: the layouts, masters, themes, media and effects are the designer's, untouched, with only the words and swapped pictures rewritten. Every text box is live in PowerPoint. It is not a deck of flat pictures.
Everything is filed in your Gallery as ordinary editable content, so you can keep working on it in the app, share a link that opens with no account, or export it again later.
The finished deck records which template page each slide came from, which is what lets the comparison and the native export keep working long after the run has finished.
What it does not carry across
Stated up front, so none of them is a surprise on slide 40. Everything else in a normal business deck comes across.
Tables, charts and SmartArt inside the OLD deck are not read, so their content does not carry across. In the new template they survive untouched on any page whose text is not rewritten.
A Word document can be restyled, but it has no slides to picture, so its review rows carry the text with no thumbnail on the left. Nothing is invented to fill that space.
A template trained from a PDF rather than a PowerPoint can still be restyled into, but it has no PowerPoint sections to group by, and the native .pptx export does not apply to it: only PowerPoint training records the file's own slide XML. It exports as a rebuilt deck instead.
Text that lives on the master or the layout rather than on the slide (page furniture, footers, running titles) is left exactly as the designer set it. It is identical on every page by construction, so there is nothing per-slide to rewrite.