Oct 24, 2014

So you need to make a new presentation quickly and only have a half an hour!! Eek! Have no fear the Master Slide is here! Open a new presentation in Microsoft PowerPoint. Go to the view tab and click on the Slide master button in the Master Views Group. This puts you into a completely different view from the normal view. As a general rule, the master doesn't hold any content, just the formatting and layout defaults. You might notice that the slide layout at the top is larger than the other layouts. It is called the “Master” and whatever you change on it will effect change to all the other layouts. So you should stay on that Master unless you really want to only change a specific layout such as the "Title Slide" layout to make it an exception to the rest of the slides. While on that larger master layout, you can either use one of the themes from the themes gallery if those predefined styles are right for you or you can design the background yourself. To do this, you would click on the background button in the background group on the slide master tab and either choose one from the limited gallery or click on format background. This will open up the task pane on the right and then you would just choose the colours, pictures or textures that suit your needs. You can also select the text in the title placeholder by triple clicking inside it and then change the default font for all the slides. Then keep going to set the fonts for the text placeholder. You can do things like change the font size or style or the type of bullet points to be used for each of the bullet levels. You could also put your company logo somewhere on the master and that way it would be in the exact same place on every slide. Once you finish designing the formatting the way you want, you then need to close the Master View. You should see that your blank presentation has taken on the formatting of what you set in the master. This should save you lots of time from having to manually format each slide. If you decide you want to change a font or size or colour, you can just go into the master again and make the change, and all of the slides will update with that new formatting. Now hurry up! You only have 20 minutes left to copy and paste or type your content into the presentation!