MS PowerPoint

Organizing Formats with Master Slides

Behind every great PowerPoint presentation lurk masters that control the presentation's appearance: the Title Master, Slide Master, Notes Master, and Handouts Master. Each master stores detailed formatting information for title slides, "regular" slides, speaker's notes, and hardcopy handouts, respectively.

These masters control many facets of the slides themselvesbackgrounds, fonts (typeface, point sizes, colors, and the like), bullets, locations for all the main components, tabs, and indents. You can also use masters to specify picturesa logo, for exampleand "boilerplate" text that appears on all slides.

If you want to put a graphic, a piece of text, or any other type of object on a bunch of slides, add it to the Slide Master. Repeat the process with the Title Master, too, if you want the same object to appear on title slide(s).



Masters ensure a uniform appearance for your entire presentation. If you're preparing a presentation on behalf of an organization that already has a standard slide show template, use it.

When you create a blank presentation, PowerPoint creates three generic mastersSlide, Notes, and Handouts. When you apply a Design Template to your presentation, PowerPoint adds a Title Master. For presentations that use a consistent design for every slide, one set of mastersthat is, one Title Master, one Slide Master, one Notes Master, and one Handouts Masterwill normally suffice. In special circumstances, however, you might want to create multiple sets of masters. Throughout most of this section, we assume that your presentation has only one set of masters.

To work with master slides, choose View, Master, and then select Slide Master (which, confusingly, displays the Title Master and Slide Master), Handout Master, or Notes Master.