In this blog I show you “How to Format using Slide Masters in Microsoft PowerPoint 2013“

Format a presentation using slide masters in Microsoft PowerPoint 2013

What are masters?

Slide masters exist to help you create great looking presentations with minimal effort. They sit behind the presentation and govern the way it looks and behaves. You can add a logo, customise the background, and create your own colours and font combinations for the whole presentation. This means that whenever you add new slides to the presentation the formatting is taken care of and you can focus on the content.

If you want to change the look of the whole presentation, you can simply edit the Slide Master and hey presto everything will change.

You can create custom layouts in the Slide Master – just in case the layouts that exist are not sufficient for your purposes.

It is best to edit the Slide Master before you start to create the presentation. That way the look and feel is taken care of before you start.

Another reason for editing the Slide Master before you begin with the content is that any edits you make to a layout after you have built the slides, will have to be applied in retrospect, which means that you have to go back and reapply those layouts to the affected slides.

There are several masters:

• Slide Master – this master is for the presentation itself.
• Handout Master – this master determines how the handouts will look.
• Notes Master – this master controls how any notes will look.

View the Slide Master

To get to the Slide Master

1. Click the View Ribbon

Then click on the Slide Master Icon

Figure – Master view icons

The Slide Master

The Slide Master view looks a little different. The top slide in the thumbnail list is the Slide Master and controls the presentation. Each Slide Master has a number of related layouts – you probably won’t use all of them. You may modify some and delete others to keep consistency.

When you make changes to the Slide Master, anyone else working on your presentation can use the new formatting in Normal View, and they can’t accidentally change it.

Figure – the Slide Master

Happy Learning!

 This topic has been taken from my free eBook on Microsoft PowerPoint 2013 which can be downloaded here:

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