An editor that opens on nothing drives people away. Whoever prepares the announcements on Saturday evening is often a volunteer, often alone, and nobody will train them. Faced with a blank frame, they go back to the tool they already know. That is why the Studio never offers a blank page first.
A template is not a saved slide
It is a set of layouts. A cover, which does not look like the rest; inner pages (section title, content, two columns, key figure, quotation, list); a closing page.
That is what changes everything in use: when you add a slide, the Studio offers your template's layouts, in their order, before the eight generic ones. You do not redo the formatting on every page.
Eighteen starting points, in three families
Service and assembly: Sunday announcements, welcome, verse of the day, birthdays of the month, baptisms, offering campaign.
Meeting, ministry, group: agenda, minutes, quarterly goals, figures and review, team presentation, roadmap.
Event and training: upcoming event, retreat programme, training session, questions and answers, mission departure, thanks.
Half of them do not speak of church, and that is deliberate. A department meeting does not need a sanctuary background. These templates serve a committee, a youth group or a training day just as well.
Your church creates its own
Open a deck you have polished, go to the Deck tab in the right-hand panel, unfold Save as template, give it a name.
What is saved is a copy. The deck you opened carries on: you can change it afterwards without the template moving. The template appears for the whole church, not only for you, on the "New deck" page.
Speaker notes do not follow: they speak of one particular meeting, and would turn up in every later one.
Sanctumel adds more over time
A template is data, not an application version. When we publish a new one, it appears for you without an update and without touching the decks you have already created. The date of the latest addition is shown at the bottom of the "New deck" page.
If a template relies on a layout your version cannot draw yet, it does not appear at all. That is deliberate: better not to offer a starting point than to offer one that opens on nothing.
And the blank page, all the same
It is there, at the top of the "New deck" page. It is not truly blank: it arrives with your church's background, because starting from scratch does not mean starting from a white square, which looks like nothing once projected.