Your church already has years of files: the announcements, the training material, the retreat programme. Starting over is not a reasonable option. The Studio takes in what you have, and lets you take out what you make.
Importing: two paths, and the choice is yours
From the Projection → Slides library, two buttons.
Import a PowerPoint brings in everything that can be reworked: the text and its formatting, the file's colours, the pictures, the shapes that make the coloured cards, the tables and the charts. What comes in edits as if you had composed it here. Animations and SmartArt do not follow, and Sanctumel says so at the end of the import.
Import a PDF brings the page in exactly as drawn, pixel for pixel. A brochure laid out by a designer arrives intact, with its fonts and effects. In exchange, nothing can be edited any more: each page becomes an image. Up to sixty pages.
Either way a new deck is created. Importing never replaces what you had open.
The file's colours, unless they are already yours
A deck built in white, with gold headings and blue subheadings, comes back white, gold and blue. The hierarchy someone put there is the very reason to import: replacing it with your own charter would erase it.
Two exceptions, and both work in your favour.
A colour that is already one of your charter's becomes a role rather than a fixed shade. The file's gold stays "the church's gold": the day you change your gold, this deck changes with it.
Text that would be invisible is replaced. It is measured against the background that will really sit behind it, the card rather than the slide. A gold heading on white, on the other hand, is not "corrected": it is a decision, and someone looked at it.
Charts arrive with their figures
An imported chart is not a picture of a chart: its figures live in the slide. Correct an amount and the drawing follows. That avoids the most embarrassing case of all: a chart pasted in as an image, a year out of date, projected to the congregation as though it were current.
The figures are typed in the grid below the slide, the same one tables use: categories along the top, one series per row. You can paste into it from a spreadsheet.
Three shapes: bars to compare, line to follow over time, pie for a breakdown. A chart that mixed bars and a line arrives in the shape of its first plot.
Exporting: four outputs, for four gestures
PowerPoint to send to someone who does not have Sanctumel. Text stays text: the recipient can correct it.
Sanctumel format (.sml) to send to another church on the Suite. It is the only format that knows an element is a verse, a song or a Message paragraph, and the only one that keeps your colours as roles: the deck that arrives redresses itself in the receiving church's colours.
PDF to print and to archive. The board keeps the minutes, the trainer hands out the material, and a PDF opens anywhere with nothing to install. It comes out at your slide size rather than on A4, so that projecting from the PDF adds no white bands.
Images to share. A single slide, to post in the church group on Saturday evening; or all of them, in a numbered archive.
What the export tells you
An export never stays silent about what it had to change, and it says what it put in place. A gradient background becomes a flat colour, the gradient's starting one: nothing is lost, the background is simply flat. Our icons, on the other hand, are genuinely absent from the file, because they come from Sanctumel and not from a font. You read it at export time, not in front of the congregation.
Slides that are not compositions (a countdown, live song lyrics) are skipped in PDF and image exports: they render live and have no fixed image. You are told how many.
If the import refuses
- "This is not a .pptx file": it is an old
.ppt. Open it in PowerPoint and use Save As in.pptxformat. - "File too large": beyond 25 MB it probably holds videos. Remove them before importing.
- "No readable slide": the file is empty or damaged.