If you've ever edited each of a presentations 100 slides to change the font
size, color, or style, then you need to know about the slide master.
If slide titles or the company logo jumps around in position from one slide to
the next, you need to meet the slide master.
I'm Dawn Bjork and Microsoft Certified Trainer and a certified PowerPoint
specialist. Let's look at the slide master.
This is the critical feature that's unknown to most PowerPoint users.
During speaking and training engagements,
typically only about 10% of all the participants are familiar with the slide
master and that's a huge loss in productivity. First,
it may be helpful to know that every presentation has at least one slide master
whether or not you work with it directly.
The slide master is a blueprint for your presentation and it helps you to create
a professional slide deck without a lot of effort.
PowerPoint applies changes made to placeholders, background, color,
effects, fonts, positioning, and graphics. You kind of get it;
just about everything is on a master,
which links to specific presentation slide layouts.
Have you ever played around with different PowerPoint themes? For instance,
in this presentation,
if we wanted to change the look of the slides and the overall presentation,
we could do so by going to design,
and here we have a variety of different themes. Now,
most of these are built into PowerPoint.
You'll find thousands of other options by going to File and New and searching
for different themes.
That is you may not find a layout or a look that fits within the built-in
choices. Just for example, if I wanted to select this design,
notice how it changes everything about the presentation, the same content,
but now we have a change to the color scheme, the fonts,
the placement of the elements,
and this particular theme also has color variations.
You'll find these in the upper right hand side of this design area under
Variants. Now, not everything has this,
although there is a Colors place where you could actually pick custom color
schemes to apply. So if I change to the blue one,
notice how this overall transforms the look of this presentation.
Or we could dig into a completely different design theme,
which may or may not also have its own variations.
Let's dig in now into the PowerPoint slide master and look at how you can work
with it to save hours, customizing the look of your presentations.
As we just saw, when you make a change on your own slide masters,
PowerPoint applies that change to every related slide in the presentation.
Now this saves you a lot of time and gives your presentation a consistent look
and feel. But because of that,
it's also good that you make sure that you make copy of your current
presentation simply so that you can experiment with some of these changes
without dramatically or adversely impacting the look of your slides.
Now in this presentation we have some consistency but we also have a few issues
with the look and layout and I'll share with you how you can change these as
well.
Let's say in a slide we want to impact or change the title.
The common approach is to simply come in and perhaps we'll make this bold and
I'll make it red.
If that's a look that you want to apply to the entire presentation,
that would also mean that you would be manually moving to each slide and making
this update and this was one of the reasons why you want to know about the slide
master instead of individually changing it.
We can change it overall for the look of the presentation.
To find the slide master, we'll go to the View tab.
From there you'll see that not only do we have different presentation views such
as the Slide Sorter, Notes Pages,
but we also have master views.
Here is the Slide Master and may be also helpful if you use handouts or notes to
explore that. You can also customize those masters
from the slide master.
Now we see the behind the scenes and I'll move up here to the top to see.
This is the primary master that feeds into all of these other different layouts.
Now each presentation can look a little different.
Really want to start at the very beginning here because it's going to be more
work if you're working with an existing presentation and making these changes,
especially with manual formatting.
Sometimes the final product doesn't look anything like the layout that was used
to build it. Let's go back to that title example.
This is where we changed the appearance, so for instance,
I want to maybe make this bold.
Notice that these colors are coming from the theme.
You actually could pick any color that you want,
but these are colors that are designed to work together and so then you also
have another place where you can be more consistent.
I'll pick the green here by making that change.
This feeds into the other slides. Here, for instance,
is the layout for our title slides or for our content slides where we will
typically put in bullets or at other PowerPoint elements,
so see how these are connected. Now,
couple other things that you might want to consider.
Let's add a logo that would be under Insert >
Pictures and we navigate to where that logo is stored.
In this case, I'll move the logo to the bottom right hand corner. And this could
also move to another corner or a location in the slides.
Make that a little bit smaller. It's becoming more common,
not to necessarily show this on every single slide,
but is branding that some organizations like to have.
And so often we'll see these placed individually on the slide just jumping
around because they're not in a consistent location.
You might notice here too that this is carrying forward to a number of these
different layouts but not to our title slide and that is on purpose,
although we might want to see the logo.
There's often a lot of other things that are going on in the title slide and so
perhaps we want it in a different position,
different size or not at all because of other graphics that are part of this.
Let's go ahead and see how these simple changes are impacting our primary
presentation. Now,
one of the things that can also happen in presentations too is a presentation
can actually have multiple slide masters,
especially if we're importing from different sources.
So it could be on purpose or maybe not at all.
But from here ,I'll close the master view and notice that this change that we
make, the logo in the corner that is displaying.
However, because this was manually formatted,
this title did not get updated as other changes were made,
but it shows on other slides
that were not manually formatted. So that's something that we'll look at.
How can we fix it when the slides already have changes in it?
Now here's one of the other things that can happen.
Some slides just might have too much going on, so we look, for instance,
that putting that logo into the slide master.
Maybe that's something that we don't want to see because there's just already a
lot of busyness.
That is something that can be changed either in the slide master for individual
layouts or for individual slides. Now in this case,
I'll go back to Design and on the far right hand side is Format Background.
From here I'll choose Hide background graphics and so if you pick that,
notice what happens to the slide layout.
Those background graphics are not displayed and now this helps us to focus only
on that chart and it's only for this individual slide.
You would have that option as well to apply to the specific layouts.
That's look at those layouts for just a moment.
Under Home when we're working with a presentation and choose Layouts for a new
or existing slide, here are those slide layouts.
So the names that display here are coming from the slide master and this also is
then what determines where these different elements will be,
placeholders, and even the formatting for those titles.
Let's move back to that slide master and just make a few other modifications to
it. Once again,
View > Slide Master and perhaps I want to move that logo around a little bit and
just move it down a little bit to the corner so it's not quite as intrusive and
I decided that I'd rather not have this be bold.
So those are minor things, but once again, if this feeds into those slides,
we only have to change it one time.
Another element that might be helpful in the slide master is to determine
whether or not you want to have a footer display slide numbers or even the date.
This is available to us under Insert and from there we have Header & Footer.
Now we could come into this without being in the slide master view,
but it's a good perspective to think about doing your primary layout work for
the formatting and the different elements right here from the slide master.
So under header and footer you can see that you could enable date and time.
Personally,
I don't like to see this because it will be the current system date rather than
the date when that presentation may have been delivered. However,
you can use this fixed element here if you'd like to display that and each one
of these elements can be moved around.
Perhaps you want a footer here and some organizations it becomes important to
identify if this is for instance,
confidential or it might be the name of the conference or simply your
organizational name.
Slide numbers can also be displayed and this is something we can show up in our
handouts as well. So if we enable that,
that also gives us another piece. But in this case,
I'll keep that turned off.
You can see in this preview that these are some of the positions in each one of
these can be moved around.
Notice as well that you have the option not to show this on the title slide and
I'll enable that too. In PowerPoint,
one of the other things for you to be watchful of is whether or not you choose
Apply or Apply to All and here we'll broadly apply this to all of the slides
that are in this presentation. Now we have that footer COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL and
this then would show at the bottom of each one of these slides.
A few changes that we've made including the logo, the footer, the title.
This is also where we can make other changes such as the appearance of our
bullets, the size of the text that's used for the bullets,
for instance,
and other changes that hopefully improve the readability and the quality of your
presentations. Once again,
we'll return back to the normal view.
Now there's a couple of ways to do that.
The easiest thing to look at is the Slide Master tab here where you can close.
But if you went to View and Normal,
that would also take you out of this view.
Now let's address here where we might have slides that do not match those
choices.
So now that you know about the slide master and have applied the changes,
how can we apply the consistency from one slide to another?
If most of the presentations you create and edit are versions of previous ones,
you might be thinking that the slide master won't work for you because you're
really not creating presentations from scratch.
Is that you might be given the presentations with a lot of manual formatting
that you're somehow supposed to magically make it look good.
One of the reasons that editing slides can be such a time suck is because manual
formatting overrides the slide master formatting.
And we also have this challenge that sometimes the corporate or organizational
slides are really not based upon the slide master.
So if you have a template that simply has some sample slides you're supposed to
copy,
then it might be more challenging to be able to really work with these features.
Depending upon how often you use that template,
it might be worth digging into and exploring whether or not those examples could
actually become part of the slide master.
So here we have a couple problems and that is that these are slides that have
been manually formatted and this is really a bad slide.
Here's just a change the title,
but how can we fix these so that they will match our preferences in the slide
master?
The first thing is to select one or more slides and I can do that through CTRL
and just by holding CTRL can click on these.
These are the slides I want to apply changes to.
You actually could CTRL + A and select all of them if that was an issue.
But you may want to do case by case just to see what happens because it might be
much more dramatic than you were expecting.
Next what we will do is simply right-click and here is Reset Slide.
Ready? This is the magical part of working with the slide master.
The slide is reset including this one that was very,
very bad and this one is well.
The other place you can find Reset is in the Home tab and Reset.
This is one of my favorite time-saving PowerPoint tips. With just a few clicks,
the slides are formatted to match the slide master.
Where did it get that information? Once again,
let's go to View > Slide Master.
As you hover over each of these layouts,
one of the things that you'll see here is it says Title and Content Layout used
by slides and you'll see those numbers.
That's where it was getting the information to know what to reset to.
This is also something which you can work with once you're familiar with the
slide master is to create your own custom layouts,
to rename them. For instance, if I right click here,
I could insert a brand new slide master, insert a new layout,
duplicate this layout,
and make some changes to it and even rename them so that they might be clear or
more specific to our preferences in that.
How can you be more productive and have more fun by working with the slide
master in PowerPoint. For more time-saving PowerPoint tips and techniques,
head to TheSoftwarePro.com/PowerPoint.
I hope you've learned multiple ways to save time in PowerPoint with the slide
master. This is Dawn Bjork, The Software Pro. Thanks for watching.
[inaudible].