You are probably wondering what the title of this blog post means… Well PowerPoint has a new feature, something that has been requested for year. And it makes me very happy to finally have it!

PowerPoint has added to the date footer list a new option. The ability to just list the year.

Where I see this simple addition being invaluable is for corporate PowerPoint templates (also Word and Excel templates). Every year the template automatically updates to display the current year! If you are not cheering, I am guessing your company template does not include a copyright statement – that needs to be manually updated each year (or updates automatically because your company paid for a very cool, but not cheap, add-in).

Here is a quick example of adding a copyright statement preset on the bottom of all slides in a corporate template. The year automatically updates so the copyright information is always current. For this example I am manually adding text in front of the year “(C) TLC Creative Services”. TIP: text can be added any of the footer placeholders and variable part, in this instance the date, remains coded to update. Works for source and page number footers.

Additional information:

  • This is a four digit year (e.g. “2020”)
  • It was release with Win32 build 16.0.12527+ and Mac build 16.35.2002+
  • It will display on all endpoints (Win32, Mac, mobile, web), including legacy builds (yay!).
  • It may not display on legacy builds that are localized to other languages, and in those instances it defaults to display the first datetime field type (eg. 4/20/2020 would display in the above example)

Troy @ TLC