From the course: PowerPoint 2016 Essential Training

Controlling the look of your presentation with slide masters

From the course: PowerPoint 2016 Essential Training

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Controlling the look of your presentation with slide masters

- The built-in themes can give you a great head start, but you can actually fine-tune them even more. You can change the colors on a very granular level so just slightly altering them to match a company logo. You can even change the font. This change can apply to all your slides. The base design for any theme is called the Slide Master, and there's a Slide Master for each theme that you've applied in your presentation. In this case, there's two different themes. So when we view the Slide Master, we'll see the Slide Master for both those themes. The Slide Master also contains the layouts for each theme. Let's take a look. We can get into it by clicking the View ribbon tab and clicking Slide Master. Here's the main master theme. You'll see that this is the first thing that we have and if I scroll down I can see the master for the second theme. Every thumbnail contains the different layouts and the Slide Master will also tell me how many slides are using a particular layout. So if I'm looking to make a change I'll know if it's used by any slides. If it's not used by any slides, I won't need to change it. Here's the title slide. If I hover my mouse over it, I can see that it's used by one slide. I'm going to click on this title and content slide. To make a change, I can click and drag with my mouse to highlight the content placeholder text. From here, I can do things such as make it bigger, smaller, I can boldface it, I can even change the color of it. In addition to changing font properties, I can also change the layouts themselves. I can click on a placeholder block of text. It's going to highlight the entire block. This is a footer, and we'll be going over footers later, but I can change where that fo`oter is in my slide. With this placeholder selected, I can nudge it. That is, use the left and right arrow keys on my keyboard to move it over just a little bit. I can also do it with this placeholder on the right-hand side. I'll click once around the gray box to select it and this time I'll nudge it by using the arrow key on the right. It moves over just a little bit. I'll show you one more type of change. Here's the layout that we used and the one slide that has a different theme. I can change the color of this slide and it will apply to any slide that I give this layout to. I'm going to click on this color block. From here, I can change the color of it. If I select Fill, I can see that it's a black color. I'm going to change it to something that's a little bit softer to go along with the other theme that I've chosen. If I hover my mouse over it, I can see each change as I'm hovering my mouse. This makes it much easier to pick a new color. I'm going to pick a soft gray color. Once I've got that color selected, it's going to make the change to any slide that uses this layout. While we were making these changes, you could also click on the Home ribbon toolbar tab and change the font properties this way. To close out of the Master View and to get back to editing the actual content of your presentation, you first need to click back on the Slide Master ribbon toolbar. This is going to bring you back into the slide Master View, and from here you can click Close Master View. This is going to bring you back to your presentation. You'll notice that it's been updated to our changes and this is now a much softer gray. And if I click New Slide, I can see that this particular layout has the change that we made. So that's how easy it is to change the look and feel of all of your slides all at once by using the Slide Master.

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