Feb 13, 2014

The Slide Master is a template whereby all formatting of the slides in that particular deck will follow the template. A change to the Slide Master can potentially affect every slide in the presentation. The Layout Master affects layout and formatting of a particular slide. By default, there are nine layouts in a new presentation, but more can be added.

Let’s say you want all your slide titles to have certain formatting attributes. You would set these attributes in the Slide Master and then, for example, change the formatting of the title placeholder. This would have a cascading effect across all of the slides that have not had their title formatted previously. Now, let's say you want the 'Title Slide' layout to have a different title placeholder than the one you have just set in the Slide Master. You would change this particular attribute in 'Title Slide Layout Master' and this will only affect the Title Slides in the PowerPoint deck.

It is also possible to have more than one Slide Master and Layout Master in a PowerPoint presentation. Generally, multiple Slide Masters are used when one part of the deck needed to use one appearance and another part needed to use a different appearance. In PowerPoint, most of the formatting and layout choices should be made in the Slide Master and Layout Masters. The only formatting that should be done in the slides themselves should be exceptions to the rules set in the Master pages. For example, you might want one particular slide to have a certain colour title or background, or you might want certain words within the content to be bold or italics to emphasise a point. If you'd like to learn more about Slide Masters and Slide Layouts, take a look at New Horizons' PowerPoint training programs.