Automatically populate slide title onto the slide or menu

Yeah, without seeing the actual slide it's harder to troubleshoot. Knowing how Slide Titles and those pesky Master Slide text Placeholders work, my gut feeling is that the issue is there.

We have a few staff here that, for whatever reason, DELETE those text placeholders for Slide Titles and Slide Body text. If anyone within your production line does that and, instead, draws a new text frame on each slide then that will be the issue. It may LOOK like a slide title, but it can't function as one unless it's those very specific Master Slide, Slide Title Placeholder frames.

Just for fun and testing, try this:

1. Save up, then save your current working file with a TESTING file name. That way you have your original (clean) working file, and this new testing file. We may break something and you don't want to go and mess up a good working file. Crashes happen enough as it is ;)
2. From within your TESTING working file (the original is safe and secure somewhere else, now, right?), go to the slide that's giving you grief.
3. Click on the title text frame of that slide.
4. Delete the title text frame of that slide.

Did anything happen? If you are using the proper setup, then once you delete your slide title you should see the default Slide Title Placeholder take its place. You can confirm this because it will show the text, "Click to add title."

If after deleting your title text frame it does NOT show the text, "Click to add title," then that tells me that you aren't using the proper title placeholder as described above and in my earlier post. If this is the case, your thumbnail will NEVER reflect what you are typing as a slide title.

If it DOES show the text, Click to add title," then just retype it. See if that clears it up. You may need to then retype "Untitled Slide" under the thumbail to try to re-associate the thumbnail back to the slide. I'm not sure, to be honest. Someone listed a numbers step process earlier so scroll up a bit for that if you need it.

...

If you are NOT seeing, "Click to add title" then maybe the slide isn't linked to a Master Slide? To test this:

1. Find the slide thumbnail.
2. Right-click the thumbnail itself and click "Apply Layout" from the context menu that appears. This will reveal all the Master Slides currently available to you, and will show you which of those Masters is being used on your current slide selection.
3. Whichever Master Slide is currently associated with that slide should be highlighted in light blue. Your settings MAY show different, but it will be highlighted one way or another.
4. If the highlighted Master Slide is titled, "Blank" then there is your issue. The default BLANK Master has no placeholder text frames. You will need to select another Master Slide layout that at least has a "Title" placeholder. The most basic, default Master Slides should offer you "Title and Content," "Title Only," "Question," "Question with Media," and "Blank." People make their own custom Master Slides, so you may see a whole group of wonky slide master options too.
5. After selecting one of the other Master Layouts that has a real, working Slide Title placeholder, your slide content may shift. We're just testing so that's cool. At least now you may be able to see the correct Slide Title placeholder frame. If so, then type in your title. Look at the thumbnail.
6. If the Thumbnail title did not automatically update, then try typing the "Untitled Slide" under the thumbnail process again. That should sort you.

Note: Unfortunately, this may affect slide layout so I guess there's a measure to be made here. Which will cost LESS time: Updating slides or just manually typing in the thumbnail titles any time you change the slide title. Doin this for every slide MAY not be worth the effort depending on how complex things are.

One last thought:

The only other thing I can think of might be that you have an extra "Space" in your thumbnail title text. After double-clicking the thumbnail title to edit it, do a CTRL + A to Select All (or just triple-click that text to make sure any Spaces before or after are also selected. THEN type Untitled Slide

That's about all I got. Even if you managed to totally destroy this test file, you got the original working saved up..... right? That's always good practice :)

:D