Leveraging PowerPoint’s Slide Master for Design

PowerPoint’s Slide Master is a design feature that is still overlooked by so many presentation creators and presenters. This is the main reason why I have seen so many presentation files where content has been created by hand on each slide. No wonder people have been complaining all this time that slide creation takes so much time!

Therefore, the use of slide masters is one of the first topics I go through in my training sessions. If you are still creating your slides by deleting the placeholders you see on the blank slides and get busy adding text boxes and other types of content manually, this chapter will help you gain hours of your life back. I usually even make this bold statement to users: if you use the Slide Master feature, you’ll automate up to 90% of your presentation design tasks. You’ll stop re-creating basic design on each slide to focus on adding your content.

The goal here is not to show...

Technical requirements

PowerPoint’s Slide Master feature can be found in all versions of the application. The topics discussed in this chapter can be applied to whichever version of PowerPoint you are using, although you might encounter some differences if you are not using PowerPoint in its Microsoft 365 subscription model.

Understanding layouts and placeholders

Through the years, I have seen many people start a new presentation and tell me they did not like the text boxes on the first slide, so they just deleted them to start from scratch. Unfortunately for them, they did not know that doing so would make them work much harder than necessary to create their slides. This also makes it even harder if they decide to change the overall look of their presentation. This huge mistake usually happens because users don’t know about two fundamental features in PowerPoint: layouts and placeholders. So, let’s show you what they are and how they will help you create your content faster.

Layouts

When you start a new presentation with PowerPoint’s blank default template, your new file already includes a title slide. But there are more layouts available in the Home tab (1). To access these, in the Slides group (2), click on the Slide Layout (3) drop-down list (Figure 3.1):

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Choosing fonts and colors

Since the introduction of Office 2007 by Microsoft, users started to see the presence of themes in their applications. Just to keep the description short, we can say that themes help to define the overall look of a document in terms of colors, fonts, effects applied to shapes, and so on. As you might have noticed, I put emphasis on the word document. That’s because a theme can be applied throughout your Office applications, making your Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents look more consistent. Microsoft supplies some free themes that can be found in the Themes list in the Slide Master view. If you want to learn more about themes, you should check out Echo Swinford and Julie Terberg’s book Building PowerPoint Templates v2, listed in Further reading.

Using one of Microsoft’s themes to create your presentations can help speed up the design process, if one suits your needs. But I would still advise you to make some changes so that your...

Configuring standard layouts

We already mentioned that in the Slide Master view, the Slide Master is the larger thumbnail and the smaller ones that follow are the layouts. Another element you need to be aware of is the highlighted thumbnail (1), which shows you the layout of the slide you were on when you opened the Slide Master feature (Figure 3.14). You can hover over any thumbnail to show a tooltip (2) that tells you on what slide(s) the layout is being used.

Figure 3.14 – The Slide Master view showing the layout applied to your current slide

Before making changes to any of the layouts, you should make title and content placeholders formatting changes and position adjustments you want to see applied in all of the layouts in the slide master (1), as shown in the first thumbnail in the view (Figure 3.15). Doing so replicates the changes to the layouts. I have created an example where I changed the font color and size and modified the vertical...

Adding custom layouts

Even though adding custom layouts can be done at any time, I prefer to do it after I have taken the time to configure and format the standard layouts. The reason is simple: you can then simply duplicate a standard layout as a starting point, rename it, and make all the necessary changes to it. Here is how you do it:

• Right-click the layout you want to start with and choose Duplicate Layout (Figure 3.16):

Figure 3.16 – Duplicating an existing layout

• Right-click the second layout that was created (1) and choose Rename Layout (2) to get to the renaming window (3). Change the name to one that describes the layout you are creating and click the Rename button (4) (Figure 3.17):

Figure 3.17 – Renaming a layout

You now have a new layout that already has the same title placeholder as your other layouts. Let’s see an example of a custom layout that I often use in presentations...

Summary

In this chapter, we discussed layouts and placeholders so that you would understand their role in the Slide Master. We also covered how to choose theme fonts and colors, and how to format your standard layouts and create new ones.

Of course, many more topics could have been included in this chapter if the main goal had been the creation of a robust corporate template. With what you have learned, you will be able to have a decent template to work from and save yourself a lot of time creating your slides afterward. Even if you have a feeling that it will take you too much time, I can guarantee you that it is all worth it. You will be able to reuse slides and create new presentations very quickly the second time around.

In the next chapter, you will be learning about the document and notes masters so you can make your PowerPoint file serve more than one purpose without overcrowding your slides. We will also explore the various ways you can print or create PDFs from your...

Further reading

• To learn how to build robust PowerPoint templates, refer to Echo Swinford and Julie Terberg’s book Building PowerPoint Templates v2
• Get more information on The Better Deck Deck, by Nolan Haims: http://thebetterdeckdeck.com/
• Microsoft article on PowerPoint keyboard shortcuts: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-keyboard-shortcuts-to-create-powerpoint-presentations-ebb3d20e-dcd4-444f-a38e-bb5c5ed180f4
• Microsoft’s stock images terms of use: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/what-am-i-allowed-to-use-premium-creative-content-for-0de69c76-ff2b-473e-b715-4d245e39e895