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9.6: Utilizing Templates and Slide Masters

  • Page ID
    14360
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    Consistency is an important quality to maintain a marketing brand. Corporate presentations should maintain consistency when utilizing certain PowerPoint functionality, particularly features like transitions, themes, fonts, etc. Two ways to maintain consistency in a PowerPoint presentation is to use templates or slide masters. A PowerPoint template is a replica of a slide that is saved as a .potx file. A template usually contains consistent layouts, fonts, colors, designs and even related content. Templates are a popular starting point for creating new presentations, in part because they save time, and maintain consistency. However, don’t be afraid to change designs add additional slides to these templates to make the presentation your own. Many organizations create an organization template that maintains the branding of the organization when employees create corporate presentations. Microsoft has hundreds of free downloadable PowerPoint and other Office templates available on Office.com. Existing and custom-created personal template files are typically found on your hard drive at:
    C:\User\<UserName>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates.

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    A slide master is the template that applies to all slides in a presentation. When all slides need to contain the same fonts, font sizes, and images (such as logos); a user can make those universal changes in one place—the Slide Master, and they’ll be applied to all the slides.

    Slide Masters
    Slide Masters

    To open Slide Master view, on the View tab, select Slide Master. The left pane will display thumbnails of the slide master and of all the slide master layouts. Hovering the pointer over a slide layout displays the layout name and indicates which slide in the presentation utilize that layout. The top icon in the left pane will display the slide master. Any modifications (formatting or added logos) to the slide master will apply to all slides in the presentation. Formatting applied to a slide layout master only affects slides that use that specific layout. To return to the normal slide view, click the Close Master View button on the Slide Master tab.


    This page titled 9.6: Utilizing Templates and Slide Masters is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Marcus Lacher (Minnesota Libraries Publishing Project) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.