Create, customize, and apply a slide master

Hide All

When you want to make a change to the look of all of the slides in your presentation, you don’t need to change each slide individually. You can make the change once on the slide master (slide master: The slide that stores information about the design template applied, including font styles, placeholder sizes and positions, background design, and color schemes.).

In this article

  Overview of slide masters

  Create one or more slide masters

  Customize and apply a slide master

Overview of slide masters

 Note   To apply more than one slide master to a presentation, see Apply one or more slide masters.

Use slide masters to make design changes that affect each slide in your Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 presentation. When you start with a blank presentation, you can add a consistent look to your slides by customizing the slide master, instead of customizing each slide individually. To customize a slide master, you specify the placements of text and objects (object: A table, chart, graphic, equation, or other form of information. Objects created in one application, for example spreadsheets, and linked or embedded in another application are OLE objects.) on a slide. You also specify placeholder (placeholders: Boxes with dotted borders that are part of most slide layouts. These boxes hold title and body text or objects such as charts, tables, and pictures.) sizes, text styles, backgrounds, theme colors (theme colors: A set of colors that is used in a file. Theme colors, theme fonts, and theme effects compose a theme.), graphics, effects, and animations.

You can create and customize a slide master to use with a single presentation, and then save the slide master as a PowerPoint presentation (.ppt or .pptx) file. Additionally, you can customize a second slide master for a single presentation to make sections of your presentation use different backgrounds, placeholder sizes, text styles, theme colors, graphics, effects, animations, and more.

You can also create a slide master, save it as a PowerPoint Template (.potx) file, and use it to create other presentations. A template file can contain one or more slide masters, depending on the complexity of your presentation, and each slide master can contain one or more standard or custom sets of layouts .

Because slide masters affect your entire presentation, when you create and edit a slide master, you work in Slide Master view.

 Tip   It is a good idea to create a slide master before you start to build individual slides, rather than after. When you create the slide master first, all of the slides that you add to your presentation are based on that slide master. However, if you create a slide master after you start to build individual slides, some of the items on the slides may not conform to the slide master design. You can override some of the slide master customizations on individual slides by using the background and text formatting features, but others (such as footers and logos (logo: A distinctive symbol that identifies you, your business, or your organization. It can combine a name, motto, and graphics.)) can be modified only in Slide Master view.

The following picture shows a single slide-master that contains three layouts.

Create one or more slide masters

For each slide master that you want to create, do the following:

1.     Open a blank presentation, and then, on the View tab, in the Presentation Views group, click Slide Master.

2.     When you open Slide Master view, a blank slide-master appears. If you want to add another slide master, do the following:

1.     Click a location in the slide thumbnail (thumbnail: A miniature representation of a picture.) pane where you want the slide master to appear.

2.     On the Slide Master tab, in the Edit Master group, click Insert Slide Master.

 Note   In the slide thumbnail pane, the slide master is the larger slide image, and the associated layouts are positioned beneath the slide master.

3.     To create a second slide master, follow steps 1 and 2 in this procedure.

Customize and apply a slide master

 Note   This procedure contains some, but not all, of the ways that you can customize a slide master. After you get started, you will be able to think of many other creative ways to customize your slide master.

1.     For each slide master that you want to customize, do one or more of the following:

§  To remove any of the built-in slide layouts that accompany the default slide master, in the slide thumbnail pane, right-click each slide layout that you want to delete, and then click Delete Layout on the shortcut menu (shortcut menu: A menu that shows a list of commands relevant to a particular item. To display a shortcut menu, right-click an item or press SHIFT+F10.).

§  To remove an unwanted, default placeholder from a slide layout, in the slide thumbnail pane, click the slide layout that contains the placeholder, click the border of the placeholder, and then press DELETE.

§  To add a placeholder to a slide layout, in the slide thumbnail pane, click the slide layout that you want to contain the placeholder, and then do the following:

1.     On the Slide Master tab, in the Master Layout group, click Insert Placeholder, and then click the type of placeholder that you want.

2.     Click a location on the slide master, and then drag to draw the placeholder.

 Tip   To resize a placeholder, drag the corner of one of its borders.

§  To add custom text to placeholders on one or more slide layouts, see Create custom prompt text.

§  To apply a theme (theme: A combination of theme colors, theme fonts, and theme effects. A theme may be applied to a file as a single selection.) to your presentation, on the Slide Master tab, in the Edit Theme group, click Themes, and then click a theme.

§  To change the background, on the Slide Master tab, in the Background group, click Background Styles, and then click a background.

§  To set the page orientation for all of the slides in your presentation, on the Slide Master tab, in the Page Setup group, click Slide Orientation, and then click Portrait or Landscape.

§  To add text that will appear as a footer at the bottom of all of the pages in your presentation, do the following:

1.     On the Insert tab, in the Text group, click Header & Footer.

2.     In the Header and Footer dialog box, on the Slide tab, select the Footer check box, and then type the text that you want to appear in the center-bottom of your slides.

3.     Click Apply to All.

2.     Click the Microsoft Office Button , and then click Save As.

3.     In the File name box, type a file name, or do nothing to accept the suggested file name.

4.     In the Save as type list, click PowerPoint Template, and then click Save.

5.     On the Slide Master tab, in the Close group, click Close Master View.