While I do not think a PowerPoint presentation is a substitute for learning to speak well, I do think that if you have that presentation down pat, visual aids can help.
For me, Master Slide are like formatting a Word document in Styles. It streamlines the creation process, helps with consistent formatting, and allows the designer to apply universal changes to large presentations both quickly and globally.
What is a Master Slide?
A Master Slide is a series of slides and sub-slides that control the layout and appearance of a PowerPoint presentation. From here you can control themes, colors, fonts, and individual slide layouts.
Master Slides Save Time
Have you ever created a presentation and had a colleague or supervisor praise it to the skies…
… except they didn’t like the font, and thought the color scheme was juuust the wrong shade of fuchsia?
If you have not formatted your presentation using the Master Slide options, but instead have formatted slide by slide, that 80 slide presentation is going to take forever to update!
If you have formatted using Master Slides, you’ll make the corrections on one Master Slide, then have those corrections populate throughout your presentation.
How Do I Use a Master Slide?
Here’s a little secret. All presentations have Master Slides. It’s just that so many of us don’t use them.
To access the slide master:
- Activate the View tab.
- Click Slide Master.
From here, you will access a Master Slide and various layouts available in your presentation. If you can do it to a slide, you can do it to a Master Slide, so this is where you can get creative. You can apply headers and footers to the slide globally, add a background image to all slides, control the font, color and layout of each slide.