This seems like a very large design oversight in Figma Slides. The help article says that “Published changes only apply to new slide decks that are made with the template.”
Doesn’t this defeat the entire purpose of having a custom template where you can edit a style and have it apply to your entire presentation, instead of needing to manually tweak a header style on every slide? I expected this to work the same way instances update in Figma Design when you make a change to the main component, but even after publishing changes to a custom template in Figma Slides, my existing slide deck that pulls from that template isn’t updating colors & text styles. The published template changes would only apply to brand new slide decks, which means I’d have to define the template first and then create my slide deck.
That completely goes against the general approach to how many of us create slide decks. For example, I don’t make the template before I start the slide deck. I make my slide deck first by letting the content I want define the structure & storytelling and then do a layout/design cleanup pass at the end where I create and standardize some styles. This is the point at which I would find a template useful — at the end of the process. Not at the beginning.
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its gotta be on the way right? the most basic baseline of reusability
I am hoping this is a bug/update coming very soon. I would expect the children slide decks to have a banner that says the template has been updated, do you want to update? I don’t really want to use slides until I can make sure the template is working properly.
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I tried a few things and saw the same issue. This is not at all the way you would want to manage slide variables and components.
Figma Slides is not ready for actual use. Actually easier to make slides in regular Figma Design file in than in Figma slides right now with the current state of templates, colors, styles, and components in slides.
I spent a couple of hours with Figma Slides (including reading and watching all available documentation and the two longer YouTube videos on designing custom templates).
After hundreds of hours working with Figma and falling in love with the UI, and being so impressed with how they pulled off UI3 without significant breaking changes, Slides feels like it’s coming from an entirely different company. And yes, I agree with @mattaningram—in its current form, it’s pretty much unusable. I just cannot wrap my head around how they managed to ignore everything that’s great about Figma, Libraries, Components, and Variables, and invent something new that’s convoluted and confusing without offering core features:
- Switching between different Slide Templates without losing content → Fail
- Working on content while refining the template → Fail
- Organizing template slides in even the most basic manner (e.g. Naming) → Fail
- Basic support for reusable content elements (Header, Body, Footer, Page number) → Fail
Instead, you get… “Color Shuffle”!
So, for the next year or so, I’ll be using Figma again. Maybe by then, the team will have made some progress with the basics.
Hey All, thanks for the feedback and apologies for the lack of acknowledgement here!
General Discussion topics in the community typically remain as is, because the Community team isn’t flagged to allow community members to discuss freely.
That said, to clarify, as @Akhil_Dakinedi mentioned, this is currently expected behavior. Right now, published template changes will only apply to new slide decks that are made with the template. The Figma Slides team has not yet the capability to automatically push template changes to existing Figma Slides.
I’ve updated this topic into a feature request. We’ll pass this onto our Slides team for future consideration. Don’t forget to vote up top! 
Our teams use votes from the community to gauge overall interest and prioritize.