Master PowerPoint design with Slide & Layout Masters

 Feb 13, 2014

Whether your PowerPoint deck is two slides or two hundred slides, wouldn't it be great to be able to modify the layout and format of your slides as well as add new content as quickly and easily as possible? Well, that's what Slide Masters and Layout Masters are all about.
The Slide Master is a template whereby all formatting of the slides in that particular deck will follow the template. A change to the Slide Master can potentially affect every slide in the presentation. The Layout Master affects layout and formatting of a particular slide. By default, there are nine layouts in a new presentation, but more can be added.

Slide Layout and Slide Master in PowerPoint

Let’s say you want all your slide titles to have certain formatting attributes. You would set these attributes in the Slide Master and then, for example, change the formatting of the title placeholder. This would have a cascading effect across all of the slides that have not had their title formatted previously. Now, let's say you want the 'Title Slide' layout to have a different title placeholder than the one you have just set in the Slide Master. You would change this particular attribute in 'Title Slide Layout Master' and this will only affect the Title Slides in the PowerPoint deck.

Slide Layout and Slide Master in PowerPoint

It is also possible to have more than one Slide Master and Layout Master in a PowerPoint presentation. Generally, multiple Slide Masters are used when one part of the deck needed to use one appearance and another part needed to use a different appearance. In PowerPoint, most of the formatting and layout choices should be made in the Slide Master and Layout Masters. The only formatting that should be done in the slides themselves should be exceptions to the rules set in the Master pages. For example, you might want one particular slide to have a certain colour title or background, or you might want certain words within the content to be bold or italics to emphasise a point. If you'd like to learn more about Slide Masters and Slide Layouts, take a look at New Horizons' PowerPoint training programs  

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About the Author:

Ben Kirk  

With over 16 years of experience working as a Desktop Applications specialist for a number of large education services providers, Ben is one of New Horizons most skilled and dynamic instructors. With his Advanced Diploma of Business Skills alongside his practical experience and expertise, Ben is able to provide insight and guidance to students at all skill levels across the entire Microsoft Office suite.

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