SLIDE MASTER POWERPOINT: THE COMPLETE GUIDE (#1)
Master slides control the look of your entire presentation, including, fonts, background, effects, and just about everything else. You can insert a shape or a logo on a slide master, for example, and it will show up on all your slides automatically.
- To open the Slide Master, click on “View” and then “Slide Master”.
- In any new PowerPoint presentation, you’ll get a set of standard layouts preset in the standard Microsoft PowerPoint Slide Master.
- Remember, in order to close the slide master and go back to normal view, you need to click on Close Master View in the Slide Master tab.
- The magic comes when you edit the Slide Master and customize it to your needs. Let’s see how it works.
- First, you’ll notice that the slides are not all the same; there is a hierarchy between them.
- On the very top, you’ll find the theme slide; it includes all the features to be applied to every layout. Every theme slide may group multiple layouts.
- The layouts inherit the formatting from the theme slide. When you edit other presentations, you’ll find many themes in the Slide Master.
- Some of them will look so old that they will reveal how long that presentation has been shared and reused without taking care of keeping the Slide Master clean.
- Therefore, PowerPoint allows you to have multiple themes within the same Slide Master, but I do not see why you would need to have multiple themes within the same presentation.
- My advice is to always keep just one theme and to include all the layouts you need in it.
SLIDE MASTER: APPLYING FONTS
First you need to select the theme slide, then select the Font menu in the Slide Master menu and you’ll be able to apply a font combination to the theme.
As you can see, PowerPoint gives you the opportunity to choose a combination of fonts: one for the title and one for the body.
SLIDE MASTER:APPLYING COLOR COMBINATIONS
You can apply the same method to other formatting options; for example, colors.
You’ll get many ready-to-use color combinations.
Once selected, close the Slide Master, go back to the Normal view and create a simple shape to see what happened to the color palette.
As you can see, the standard color palette has changed to allow you quickly select colors from the palette applied to the main theme.
Color combinations are one of the most powerful tools you can use to boost your communication effectiveness.
However, building a color palette requires design skills.
If you do not use specific techniques, you risk creating a negative impact with your communication.
APPLYING EFFECTS TO THE POWERPOINT SLIDE MASTER
From the theme slide, you can also control the effects applicable to shapes.
After you set them up in the Slide Master, you’ll find the effects available in the Normal view.
Insert a new shape, open the Format tab of the shape, and then the ready-to-use effect panel.
Even if this panel is very effective, I never really use it in my presentations.
The effect panel gives you the possibility to create several forms of 3D effects, which I recommend not to use in your presentations.
SLIDE MASTER: EDIT POWERPOINT SLIDE MASTER BACKGROUND IMAGE
If you want to quickly apply a background to the slides, you can easily choose it the background styles panels.
HOW TO INSERT EDITABLE PLACEHOLDERS IN THE SLIDE MASTER
You surely noticed that every time you apply a layout to a slide, it comes with placeholders like editable text boxes.
These text boxes aren’t standard ones because they are placed in a layout and can be edited from the normal view.
This mechanism allows you to leverage the power of the Slide Master.
There are several types of PowerPoint slide master editable text boxes you can apply to a layout.
The most important ones are the title and the footers. You can quickly select them from the top menu with a check box.
Date, footer description and page number are all part of the bottom page placeholders.
Once the placeholders are placed in the slide, you can format them as you prefer. You can choose among several type of placeholders.
SLIDE MASTER > PLACEHOLDERS > TEXT
Creates a text box with a pre-formatted bullet point up to five level of indentation.
The text box shows six icons in the middle that let you choose the kind of content you can insert from the Normal view.
This is the most complete placeholder.
All the others are single parts of this one.
SLIDE MASTER > PLACEHOLDERS >PICTURE
Creates a box to quickly add an image.
SLIDE MASTER > PLACEHOLDERS > CHART
Creates a box to quickly insert a chart.
SLIDE MASTER > PLACEHOLDERS > TABLE
Allows you to quickly insert a table.
SLIDE MASTER > PLACEHOLDERS > SMART ART
Placeholder for the PowerPoint Smart Arts. I never use Smart Arts, and neither should you!
SLIDE MASTER > PLACEHOLDERS > MEDIA
Perfect for inserting videos.
SLIDE MASTER > PLACEHOLDERS > ONLINE IMAGE
You can even add a placeholder to facilitate inserting images from the web.
Thanks to all these placeholders, you can create complex and accurate layouts.
You can even add multiple PowerPoint Slide Master editable text boxes in the same slide.
CLEANING UP POWERPOINT SLIDE MASTER
There are many themes with redundant layouts and many others that are in the document since it has been created and aren’t used anymore.
This is not effective because you will get lost among the layouts every time you try to apply one to the slides and it also wastes a lot of space, making the presentation very heavy.
I recommend you to clean up the Slide Master from the unused or redundant themes, and use one main theme with only the layouts you really use in the presentation.
When you start cleaning your Slide Master, you’ll notice that some layouts cannot be canceled. This happens because those layouts are in use by a slide in the presentation.
If you go over the layout previews with your pointer, PowerPoint will tell you which slide is using it, so you’ll be able to quickly find the slide and unlink it from that layout just applying another layout.
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