Funny behaviour of layers

Bonjour Fabrice.  It is possible that the master slide layout could have something to do with this behavior.  When you say there is a white square, is it just the slide background, or do you have an actual object on the slide or in the slide master?

If you'd like to share your file here, we can take a look.

No there's no object on the slide.

I think I know why. The default value for the layer layout is the blank layout from the feedback master. I thought it was because this slide was converted back to normal (It was a freeform quiz slide) but in the end, everytime I try to ad a layer to any slide of the project (even on the slides that are not and were not questions slides) the same thing happens. I'm kind of stuck here and I would really like it if you could have a look at the file and perhaps find a workaround.

Thanks !

Hi Fabrice!

Thanks for sharing the file and allowing us to take a look. I imported your slides into a new file, which cleaned up some of the extra slide masters as I was having difficulty navigating.

When applying the layout, the issue seems to go away and it appears that the layout the slide layers were tied to may have been deleted perhaps as it looks a little odd and I couldn't find the culprit causing issue.

So, I put a brief screencast together (sans audio since I have no voice) showing how to select the layers and apply the layout.

Hope this helps.

Thanks Fabrice for sharing your file here. The slide layers do rely on the feedback masters to draw their layer properties from, and when looking at the layers themselves I don't see that you've applied any layout to them? It seemed odd for sure to have that set up - so I tested applying one of your blank layers to it and then everything appeared normally on the layer. I can't say what caused this behavior but I'd want to confirm that you were working with local project files as detailed here as working off a network drive is known to cause odd behavior. 

Absolutely brilliant ! And pretty simple in the end ! I feel like I should have tried that before posting this ! Thank you both for helping me out on this ! You rock !

Glad it was so simple - and feel free to let us know if you need anything else. 

I often get that kind of behaviour with templates. Do you know of an article that explains how they work in detail. For example, if I have more than one feedback master,

- how can I apply the same feedback master to several slides without having to change them one by one ?

- Is there a way to associate a feedback master to a slide master ? It often happens that we have 3 different templates in the same project (one for each scene)

- I often have the problem of slide masters or feedback master that were inherited from previous projet and that I can't delete because they are on use somewhere. Is there a way to know what slide they are used on without parsing all slides ? I want to delete those slide masters but can't because they are on use. I would love it if I could somehow force delete them and they would automatically switch to the next master available. Or better, if I could, by right clicking on a master that I want to get rid of, choose to apply another master to all the slides that are using the master I want to get rid of.

Thanks !

Hi Fabrice,

All great questions - and our tutorials here on using the slide masters and feedback masters are a good reference and place to start. 

The default feedback master, the one associated with the top most master and likely labeled "clean" is the one that would be applied automatically when adding in a layer and it relies on that master. So if you wanted it to be a different one you'd have to apply that manually. 

The feedback masters are not attached to the slide masters, so they won't be associated with one another. 

As far as previous projects, you can see which slides are using them by right clicking on each slide and choosing layout - you should see the layout that is selected and have it highlighted. Similarly if you are on the slide masters/feedback master view and hover over each master slide you'll see a number of slides it's used by. If it has no slides being used, you could also look at deleting those masters to cause less confusion and then ensure that the additional masters don't add any bloat to your file size or course.