This is how you save time with the PowerPoint slide master

What is the PowerPoint Slide Master?

The slide master of PowerPoint is a great help if you want to use the same elements for your presentations over and over again. It will help you create your own layout templates.

Clicking on the Slide Master button in the View tab takes you to the Slide Master. The Normal View button takes you back to PowerPoint. If you’re already working on a presentation and want to make changes to your slide master as you work, you can also hold down the SHIFT key and click the “Normal” box in the lower-right corner.

A good presentation depends on the slides looking good and consistent. The headline should always be in the same place and in the same font size. You can use the slide master to organize placeholders for the content – ​​the same applies to images, statistics, and graphics.

The slide master lets you create the presets and layout presets so you don’t have to start from scratch for each slide.

How do you use the PowerPoint slide master?

Once you have the slide master open, you can work your way through the individual slides. To start, you set the guidelines for the first slide, your title page. The changes here will apply to your presentation.

The second slide is your master slide. Here you define the font, color, and size for the different text layers. Any changes here will affect all slides, so this is where you should do all the basic formatting.

Any settings you make on this top master slide affect the underlying templates. So here you can choose your background color, fonts, and sizes, paragraphs, indents, line spacing (also for the different text layers), logos or images, footer content, etc.

Ready PowerPoint templates

While the slide master helps you develop your own design and create a custom template, you can choose a template if that’s too much work for you.

You can either use a preinstalled theme with the Themes menu in the Theme Edit field or download more from the internet.

You can still change a pre-installed theme to your own liking. For this, you will find the formatting options on the right edge of the window. Depending on the selected element, you can adjust the background, the shape, or the text field here.

Create new template slides

For most presentations, you probably only need to create templates for the Title and Content and Title Only layouts. However, if you need a slide with text content and images several times, you should also create a template for this.

As a guide, we have created a template that offers space for text and an image.

To adopt the defaults from your master slide, right-click on your slide titled “Title and Content” and select “Duplicate Layout”. Now the master slide appears with the duplicated layout just below the previous one. Now you should give this template a meaningful name, for example, “Text and Image” – to do this, right-click on the template and go to “Rename Layout”.

To define the placeholders, right-click on the text field and specify these key data under “Size and position”.

Next, add an image placeholder to the slide layout. To do this, go to the “Insert placeholder” button in the “Master Layout” field and select “Image” from the drop-down menu.

Like any other field, you can place this placeholder anywhere on the slide and adjust the size. You can do this more precisely with the “Size and position” function described above. It is best to choose the same size for this placeholder as for the text placeholder.

You can now also find the new slide layout in the normal view. To do this, switch back from the slide master to the normal view (top “Close slide master” or SHIFT + “Normal”).

If you want to add a new slide now, you can right-click in the slide overview on the left and add a “New slide”. With another right-click on the new slide you can navigate to the menu item “Choose layout” and click on your just created template “Text and image”.