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Sanjay GandhiFlag for India

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Protect PowerPoint 2016 Template

Hello,

How to protect PowerPoint 2016 template, so that no one can edit without a password?
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Echo_S
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I take your answer as final. But how come some master slides are protected in some organisation's PPTs?
Very interesting question Sanjay.

If "all" you need is to prevent users from changing the slide master, you "could" just hide the button from the ribbon via the FluentUI Extensibility model (using a customUI XML part). This has the advantage that no code is required. See the attached demo of this concept. Just rename the downloaded file to remove the .zip extension (EE doesn't like us uploading standard office files!). If the demo works for you, I might write an article on how to do that.

If you really want a password, then it "could" be possible to do by repurposing the ViewSlideMaster button but that then requires VBA code linked to FluentUI callbacks and you then get into security difficulties with deploying a .potm template. A better option would be to develop a custom add-in and that's something the company I work for specialises in.
Protected-Slide-Master-Demo.potx.zip
Oops - I see I was late to the table on this one Echo! That'll teach me for popping out to test drive cars.
But how come some master slides are protected in some organisation's PPTs?

Well, it depends on what you mean by "protected." Many organizations use picture fills for their slide backgrounds. They create a picture that's got all the graphics that should be on the slide background, then they right-click on the master slide, choose Format Background, and then Picture Fill. That way nobody can select the logo, for example, and delete it. That may be what you're seeing. But there's no way to lock down things like placeholders, otherwise they're not useable.

You can do some fancy coding to lock placeholder positions -- or make them snap back into place if someone moves them -- but you'd have to install an add-in on everyone's computer to make that code actually work; you can't really make it happen with just a plain PPTX or POTX file.
Haha, Jamie! You catch me at the same quite often. :-)
Thanks Jamie and Echo. Worth trying.