Learn the secrets to using PowerPoint Slide Master effectively and save a ton of time and headache. This video covers basic as well as advanced Tips and Tricks and shortcuts.
To polish up your PowerPoint skills, please check the PowerPoint Foundation Course
Transcript
Today let's learn all about the slide master in PowerPoint and learn how to create beautiful and effective slide design in the shortest amount of time possible.
I'll start from the very Basics and as we move forward we will learn some interesting tips and tricks you may not know. Let's start right away. But before that I am Ramgopal from presentation-process.com the creator of Ramgopal's PowerPoint Mastery Program a comprehensive and creative PowerPoint training program for professionals.
Accessing Slide Master
First of all where do you find slide master in PowerPoint? There are two ways to access it.
1) The first way is to go to View tab - go to Slide Master and here on the left hand side you can see the thumbnails and what you see here is a slide Master. Let us come out of this view by using Close Master view option.
2) The second way which is the shortcut to reach slide Master is to hold the shift button down and then hit this normal view icon in the status bar and as soon as you do that you can see that we have access to our Slide Master. Once again if you want to exit this view you just need to click on this normal View and you are back to the normal view.
The 2 Types of Slide Masters
Let us understand the two types of slide Masters. If you move all the way up you will see that there is this thumbnail which is slightly larger than the rest of the thumbnails and this one is called as the Theme Slide Master. This theme slide Master influences the look look and feel of the entire slide deck it stores all the critical information of the slide deck like the theme used in the slide deck - the colors, the fonts, the effects, background styles, slide size and even things like the size of the placeholders and their positioning.
Now below this theme slide Master you see all these pre-formatted slide layouts these are called Master slide layouts. How does this theme slide Master relate to these slide layouts? This Theme slide Master influences all the other slide layouts whereas the converse is not true.
To understand this practically let us do a quick demonstration here. I am in the Theme Slide Master let us go to home and let us add a large Circle here now as soon as I drew a circle in the theme slide Master you can see that every other slide layout has the same circle now let me delete this and you can see that the circle is deleted from the rest of the layouts.
Now let me go to one of these slide layer outs and let us draw the same kind of a circle here now you can see that the circle remains in that layout alone and the other layouts are untouched. So that is the relationship between the theme slide master and the other slide layouts. Now you will understand all this much more clearly when I show you a practical demonstration of how to use Slide Master the right way.
How to Use Slide Master : A Practical Application
Now for the purpose of this demonstration I have taken a typical sample presentation now when we go to the slide sorter view you can see that these are the various slides we have in the deck. We are going to improve the look and feel of this deck using slide Master.
Step 1- Fonts: First let us score a quick win. Here is one of my all-time favorite quotes it is said by Sally hogshead. She said different is better than better. This idea applies beautifully to slide design. If you want your audience to pay attention to your slide deck then a simple trick is to make your slide deck look different from a million other slide decks your audience has already seen. So how do you make your slide deck look different? My go-to trick is to change the color theme and font theme different from the default one.
For example you can see that this font theme which uses Calibri for the title and body content has been seen by your audience a million times. Now let us try and use a different font theme and see how that affects the entire slide deck. Let us go to view Slide Master then go to fonts and choose a different font theme. Now let me go down and there are quite a few beautiful options available here. These font combinations are all chosen by experts so you can instantly make your slide deck look a lot better by choosing one of these ready-made font combinations. Let me choose this one which is Tucson Mt Rockwell and Rockwell combination this looks beautiful.
Step 2- Colors: Next I want to change the color theme so let us go to colors and choose a different color theme than the default office one. Now let me go down and let me choose this one which looks very colorful called Aspect and let me close Master view. Look at this slide deck! It looks so much better and so much more refreshing than the default look and feel. You can see that the colors used are different and eye-catching and even the diagrams look beautiful.
I personally don't recommend using a design theme because the kind of design themes that are already here are used by a million other presenters so your audience might have already grown tired of seeing these kind of designs. So it is a good idea to not choose any of these default themes.
Step 3- Structure: The next thing I'm going to do is to make my slide title distinct from the body content. For that once again let me go to Theme Slide Master and let me make a couple of changes. The first thing I am going to do is to draw a dark band here. So let us go to Home go to the rectangle tool and draw a band like so and maybe a dark color like black is a good idea go to shape outline, say no outline. Let me right click and send this to back and let us change the font color so it is easier for the audio audience to read what you have written here. So let us go to home and change this to White if I want to increase the font size I can do so by going here and increasing the font size. Let me close Master View and see how our slide deck looks. Let me go to slide sort of view you can see that the slide design looks a lot better and more interesting than the default look and feel that we had earlier.
Step 4- Customization: Now I noticed a couple of things in the title Slide the first one is that there is this band which appears which I don't want in the title slide and second the font color seems to be white which is not what I want. I want the default black color. So how do I make the change? It is very simple. Let us make the change to the title layout in the master view so let us hold the shift button down and click on the normal View and here is the slide layout that influences the title layout design. First let us make this visible since we have changed the font color of the title here to White the same thing is carried on over here and therefore even though there is no background the color is not visible so let me select this we go to home and change the font color for this specific title layout. The next thing I want to do is to remove this band in the title layout. Now I cannot do that because this band comes from my theme slide master and if I go to theme slide master and remove this then the black band is removed across all the layouts. So how do I solve this issue of going to title layout and removing this specific black band? It's fairly simple. Again let us go to the slide Master View and here in the background group you see this option called hide background Graphics. You check that and you see that that band is removed only for this specific layout and everything else carries that band.
Let us close Master View and here we are back to the presentation now as you can see there are so many such small nuances that you need to learn about slide Master to be able to use it like a pro.
Adding Slide Background in Master
Now the next thing we will learn is where exactly this concept of slide Master come in handy in our slide design. One of the common uses is in adding slide background. Now let us say I want to add slide background to all the slides. What is the typical way of doing it? You go to Insert go to Pictures go to this Device or wherever you have stored your textured background. Let me select that here and insert and now I have this textured background. I can right click and send this to back. When I do that I need to make a whole bunch of changes now as you can see this is a bad idea because this messes up with our design. Second this keeps moving and as a result editing this slide becomes such a pain and third if you keep doing this by pasting this picture over and over again for all the slides then you increase the size of the file. The reason is, let us say, this picture is 2mb in size and your presentation has 50 slides then by copying and pasting it over 50 times you make the file size to be around 100 MB which is not a good idea. If you need to put this in the background the other way is you select this Ctrl X to cut it and then right click format background and go to to picture our texture fill and copy it from the clipboard this might sound like a good idea but then you need to keep repeating over every single slide which is a pain in itself. A much better way of doing this is, let us delete this and place this background in the master slide so let me hold the shift button click on the Normal view, go to Theme Slide Master then go to Insert pictures and pick up the same image that we had used earlier which is called textured background. I'm going to right click and send this to back and let us go to slide Master you can see that the slide title doesn't really have that and that is because we have hidden the background Graphics here so it works pretty beautifully for us. Let us close Master View and here you can see that every single slide has the same background. Now the presentation is not going to be so heavy because the pictures are not pasted over and over and again. When I go to the slide you can see that that picture is in the background so it doesn't affect my slide editing capabilities.
Placing Watermark or Logo
The reason why slide Masters are used is to place a logo on every slide of your presentation. Though I personally wouldn't recommend placing a logo on every slide because it doesn't really serve much of a purpose and it actually wastes precious slide real estate. There are certain people who would want to do it in such a case I want to show you how to place your logo on every slide but in a non-intrusive way that is by placing a washed out Watermark version of it. Let me show you how it is done. Here we are on the Theme slide Master.
Let us go to Insert go to Pictures go to this Device I have stored my company logo which is presentation process. Let us insert that you can see that the color scheme of my logo is very different from the color scheme that is used on the slide so by placing this I actually would disturb the look and feel of the slide. So let me reduce the intensity of these Colors by selecting this image and we're going to picture format color and let us choose in the recolor option this option called washout. Now you can see that the logo is washed out. I can reduce the size of it and I can place this somewhere in the bottom left corner or wherever you want to keep it now here I have increased the size so you can actually see it. Let us go to slide master and close the master view. Now on every slide but for the title slide you can see that the logo is placed. Why is it that we don't have a logo on our title slide? When we go to view slide master and when we go to this title layout you would notice that there is this option we have checked earlier called hide background graphics and that is the reason why that logo doesn't appear on the slide title.
Inserting Slide Numbers
Let us close this next let us learn how to insert slide numbers on every slide. For that first you need to go to insert then in the text group go to this option called insert slide number you get this dialog box in that you check the option called slide number and that shows you where exactly the slide number will be shown and you say apply to all. The slide numbers will be available on every single slide as you can see here on the bottom right corner. Now to check your font color font size font type Etc you need to go to theme slide master so let us hold the shift button down click on the normal view then go all the way up to theme slide Master. Here is the place where you make all the changes if you want to increase the font size you can do so by going to the Home tab and by increasing the font size like this.
If you want to change the font type you can do so like say I want Ariel black I can do that now let us make this slightly darker by going to the font color and choosing black color for this so it is clearly visible. Let us then close the slide Master view so let us go here and say close Master view now you can see on every single slide the slide number is clearly visible just as we added slide numbers.
Adding Footer
If you want to add a footer for some legal disclaimer on every single slide as it is mandated for some of the finance presentations or legal presentations you once again go to insert then go to the same insert slide number option and here you check the option called footer and you write your text here. and the job will be done and once it is done you say apply to all so that is how you add footer to every single slide. Once again after doing that you go to theme slide master and make your Corrections here for any of the changes in terms of font size type Etc.
Changing Slide Sizes
The Theme Slide Master allows you to change the slide size as well. By default all the latest presentations are made typically in 16 : 9 which is the wide format. If you want to have the regular standard format of 4 is to 3 ratio you can do so by going to theme slide Master once again. Let me go back again to the same thing go here and you can change the slide size to standard 4 : 3 but this is something I would recommend you do right before you create any of your content otherwise you may have to spend an inordinate amount of time to adjust all the images text Boxes Etc. So this is an option you have available right inside theme slide Master.
3 Additional useful tips
Before we close I want to give you three additional useful tips that can really impress your audience.
Tip 1) You can apply transitions to all your slides quite easily in the theme slide Master itself. So let us go here go to shift and then normal view go here and you can go to Transitions and you can choose a simple transition like say a Fade transition. You can apply to all. Of course you can do that outside of slide Master view as well but then this is another option available for you to apply to your slide Master.
Tip 2 ) The next interesting trick is to apply animation to a certain slide layout. For example let us go to this one which is the title and content layout and I want to say that my bullets need to appear with fade animation on click. I can do so by going here and by choosing animations in the Animations tab I can choose Fade and say Start on click. Now every single bullet will come in with a fade animation on click whenever you use this layout as your slide Master.
Let me take this one step forward let us go to animation pane here let us open the animation event go to effect options and I'm going to do this additional thing which is after animation it should dim into a lighter color like this and I'm going to say okay. Now the animation is, on a click, the first bullet will appear, then on a click the second bullet will appear while the first bullet will dim out. Let us see how this applies to one of our slides. So let us go to slide Master go to close Master view let us go to slideshow and see how the whole thing works. Here you can see that I have not really added any animation it is part of slide Master. On a click I have the first bullet point appear then on a click you can see that the first bullet dims out and then the next one appears and then that one also dims out and it goes on.
Tip 3) Let me share the final trick. Let us say you have multi-person presentation that is two or more people are presenting from the same slide deck. Each person presents a different section of the presentation. You can make the different sections visually distinct by having a duplicate of your theme slide Master. Let me show you what I mean by that. Let us go to the Theme Slide Master by holding the shift button and normal View and you can see that this is one set one theme slide master and all these child slide layouts. I can Right-Click and go to Duplicate slide Master option you can see that the first one is duplicated and now we have a new theme slide master and the corresponding layouts. Here I can add a different background. So let me right click go to Format Background and let us give this a very light maybe this kind of orange accent color and let me close Master view now. At this point you may not really see any of the slides in that particular color but if I were to introduce a new slide let me go to the normal view let us add one more slide here let us assume that this is a new section and for this I want to choose a different layout. So let us right click go to layout and the layout I would want to choose is this one you can see that my new section can have this color so now when I go to slide starter view I can visually distinguish different sections because of their different color background and it makes it easier for different people to present their sections.
Save Slide Master Template
Before we go one final bonus tip and that is if you want to reuse all the hard work that you are put in in designing one presentation you can save that presentation as a template. So the next time you want to start a new presentation you can start the presentation from this template. All the changes that you had made in the Slide Master will reflect in the new presentation as well. How do you do that? Let us go to File - Save As and here I want to change the Save Type as a Template. Let me go down here we have this option called PowerPoint template *. p o t x
You can select that and you need to save. I would highly recommend that you don't change the place where your templates are stored just go with the flow and you say save. Let me start a new presentation let me go to File - New. This time I want to choose a custom template so let us go to custom and here I have custom office templates let me double click and here I have the new template that I had created which is Typical sample presentation. I can click and I would be able to create a new presentation by clicking on create option a new presentation is created. This presentation will have all the characters that we had introduced in the slide Master. Let us go to the Theme Slide Master go to View slide master and you can see that every change that we had made is now retained in the new presentation. So that way you save a lot of time and ensure that there is consistency in your design.
If you like my way of teaching then you can join our Complete PowerPoint Foundation course . This program is quite detailed with more than 12 and a half hours of content every aspect of PowerPoint is explained in a way that even a beginner can understand and use very easily. Of course if you want to get a combination of PowerPoint Excel and Word Foundation Courses then you have that option available as well.
If you are a professional who needs to make presentations as part of your profession then it's a good idea to consider investing in this combo or in PowerPoint Foundation course.