Like a lot of you reading this, I'm working on my slides for Lotusphere 2012. IBM wants the slides in Symphony's ODP format -- and has "strongly requested" that we use Symphony to present.

I hate Symphony. Truly, deeply, hate it. That said, I've got to use it in this case and I've got a bunch of existing slides I want to drop into my presentation. What's difficult, is applying the appalling templates provided without manually changing every single slide. Here's what I did to really speed things up.

1. In Powerpoint 2007 - where my slides were - I saved the slides as "ODP" Open Office Presentation format.

2. In Symphony, I opened the ODP file and from there, switched to "Slide Sorting" mode and copied the slides I wanted to the clipboard.

3. I opened the template provided by IBM, and saved it with the new name of my presentation.

4. I pasted the copied slides into the slide sorter or the new presentation.

5. I closed the original one so I didn't accidentally edit in there.

6. In "Normal" mode, I selected all the new slides, the right clicked and chose "Slide Templates"

7. I selected the one that looked like what IBM had given me but was a title and bullets style (not the title slide). With right click, I applied this to all my selected slides.
** THIS DOES NOT CHANGE THE TEXT FORMAT

8. I right clicked on my selected slides and chose "Slide Layout"

9. I right clicked the one with a single title and bullets and applied that to all my selected slides
** THIS ALSO DOES NOT CHANGE THE TEXT FORMAT

10. I went into "Outline View" mode and selected all my new content -- the right clicked and selected "DEFAULT FORMAT"

As far as I know, this is the only way to apply the text formatting to all the content at once. It worked for me.