If there's one thing that you're going to find confusing in PowerPoint, it's probably going to be the slide master. Understanding how the slide master works is integral. If you want to create presentations super fast. So I'm going to show you how you can work with the slide master, and then you'll be able to see exactly how beneficial it is to you.
Now, I've just created a very basic presentation. This is for wild deer decorations. They're some kind of Christmas company. that sells festive decorations. Now, notice what we have on this slide. We don't have a great deal, but we do have a gradient fill background. And if you're wondering how I did that, I simply right clicked my mouse, went into format background, I chose gradient fill from the fill menu, and then I just set my gradient stops to the colors that I wanted to use.
And I'm just using two colors in this background. I then have a title text box placeholder where I've added that main title and a subtitle placeholder. Also notice in the bottom left hand corner, I have the company logo, and this is a logo that I just downloaded from Canva. Now, the first thing you need to remember about PowerPoint slides is that they always have a specified layout.
For example, this title slide just here, if we go up to the home tab and click the layout drop down, you can see that we have nine or so different slide layouts. And the one that's currently showing in grey is the one that's currently in use in this slide. So I'm using a title slide. So I've built out this title slide.
It looks exactly as I want it to look. It's now time to do the next slide. So I'm going to go to the Home tab. I'm going to go to New Slide. And then I get to choose a slide layout. So maybe I just want a blank slide on the next page. Let's click on Blank. Ugh! We just get a blank slide. It doesn't have any of the formatting that we have on slide number one.
Now, if you are then going in and repeating the entire process by formatting the background, selecting the gradient fill colors, adding your text and logo, then you are doing this all wrong. Because there is a much quicker way, and that is by modifying the slide master. So what is the slide master? I hear you cry.
Well, let's take a look at it, shall we? If we go up to View, notice that we have in the Master Views group a Slide Master button. Now, when we click on this, it's going to take us into a slightly different area in PowerPoint. And this is always where I find people start to get a bit confused because they see all of these different layouts running down the left and don't really know what any of this means.
Now what you can see in this left hand pan is basically all of the different slide layouts with a master or a root layout at the top. Now, don't worry about the top one just yet. If we hover our mouse over the second slide in this list, you can see it says title slide layout. If we hover over the one below title and content layout, the next one is section header layout, so on and so forth.
And if we come all the way down to here, you can see that we have a blank layout. So what you're seeing in here are basically all of those nine different layouts that we can select to apply to our slide. Now the one at the top, the very first one, this controls the overall presentation. So what we can essentially do here is if I want that gradient fill to appear on every new slide that I add, I could change this root master slide to include that formatting and then it's going to apply to all of the slide layouts.
Whereas if I only wanted the gradient background fill to apply to blank slide layouts, I would simply come down here and I would make my changes. So, you basically just choose the slide layout that you want to apply the formatting to. If you want to apply it across your entire presentation, you select the master root slide.
So with this one selected, let's go in and let's make some changes. Now, let's say that I want all of the font across all of my slides to be Fira Sans. So I'm going to click on the title slide box at the top here. Let's go to Home. And I'm going to change this to Fira Sans Black. So now all of my titles across all of the layouts are going to be using this font.
And you can see that that has automatically updated across the rest of these master slide layouts. Let's change the text. So any text that we have on here, maybe I want that to be Fira as well. Now I don't want it quite as bold, so let's choose something within the same family, but A little bit smaller, so we'll go for Fira Sans Condensed.
And again, that is going to update across all of my slide layouts, because I'm changing it in the root master slide. Now, I'm going to go in to my slide master ribbon, and I'm going to format the background. So I can go to Background Styles, Format Background, Gradient Fill, and check out what happens. It picks up the gradient fill that I've got applied in my presentation.
So this is looking pretty good, and you can see that it's applied to all of my slides. If I just had the blank slide layout selected as I was applying these, it wouldn't change in any of the others. So that is the distinction between this top slide and everything that comes underneath it. Now maybe at this stage I decide, actually, I don't want black text, I want white.
So again, let's click and let's just change the font to white. And I'm going to do the same for the body text as well. Let's make that black. And the final thing I want here is I want to make sure that my company logo is on every new slide that I create. So instead of going in and just inserting it each time, we can also add that to the master.
So I'm going to click on insert. Let's go to picture. I've got mine saved off to this device. There it is just there. Let's click on insert and then we can resize it and place it wherever we want. So I'm going to put mine somewhere down there. Now, once you've made all of your changes, you can click on close master view, and it's going to take you back to your presentation.
Now, check out what's happened on the first slide. Because I already had the logo inserted, I just inserted it as a picture. It's now showing the logo twice, so I can simply delete out one of them. This is the one that's being used in the slide master. And if we go to the second slide, we have the logo on there as well.
What about if I add a new slide? Let's go for a title and content slide and check it out. All of the fonts are set for me. I don't have to change it each time I create a new slide. So that is the benefit of utilizing the Slide Master when you're working in PowerPoint. It is so beneficial if you have a lot of slides that you need to change, or a lot of slides that you need to keep consistent and make look the same.
Just do it once and it will apply across everything.
