Have you ever wondered how people make their own templates in powerpoint so that all their presentations look consistent? Or have you ever just lost it because your boss told you to add your company logo on every slide? Well, that’s where the slide master comes in.
In this slide we added some arrows between the elements we are comparing and changed the style of the bullet points
The first thing you’ll notice is the left panel, which allows you to choose which type of slide you want to edit. You can choose a design for all your title slides or add an element to comparison slides, like this example.
First, let’s say we want to change the font we use throughout the whole presentation. Select the title and then click fonts and select the one you want to use. Now that font will be applied to all titles in your presentation and the default font each time you create a new slide. Instead of having to go change it slide by slide.
Now let’s say we want to add a different touch to my titles, let’s go to insert and image, and bring in a piece of paper. Send it to the background (by right clicking on it or using the arrange option) and maybe top it off with some sticky tape… And there you have it! Completely new and fresh looking titles for all your slides in about 2 minutes! When you finish save your changes with a name
and you can always go back to that template and use it in future presentations.
There are many options within the Slide Master, you can change the background, slide size, font, colors, footers… Just go in and experiment.
Until next time,
Byron Stanford for Project Presentation.
I just started the Back to Basics section because a lot of people often ask me how to do this type of things, and because knowing how to do them is necessary to follow a lot of what I talk about here in the blog. So here’s the first entry.
When you want to change your presentation’s background from PowerPoint’s default white color, you can do it in two different ways. Well, I’m sure there’s also other ways, but these are the two I use the most.
The first one is right-clicking on your slide and at the bottom of the drop down menu you have the option Format Background. When you select it, you see a window that will let you select what type of fill you want to give your slides. You can select a different color from white for your background; this is something I don’t usually recommend, unless it’s a soft tone, because it’s still one flat color. The next option is to fill it with a gradient, this is more attention-grabbing and something I usually use, if you play around with the options you can get some interesting looking backgrounds, like this:
The good thing about gradients is that they get rid of the boring flat background colors. There’s two more options, fill with a picture or texture and pattern fill; forget textures and patterns all together. When you want to use a picture as your background just navigate to the file (no clipart! I repeat, no clipart!). Finally chose if you want to use that picture or color as a background for one slide or the whole slideshow. You also have the option here to reset background and go back to the classic background.
When you use images as a background, be careful they have enough quality so they don’t look pixelated when blown up, and also try to use images that are not too busy and follow the rule of thirds.
The second method for changing your background is changing the Master Slide, but I’ll go over this in the next entry.
Until next time,
Byron Stanford for Project Presentation.
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