Adding standard features to several (or all) slides

You may want to add a logo or design element to several slides or even all of them. A simple way to do this is to add these to one slide and position them appropriately. Then copy one, go to another slide and paste. It will appear in exactly the same position. Paste again as required and then repeat the process for any other items.

Master slide

This is a useful, but quite advanced, feature of PowerPoint. If you can find a design template for your show that you’re happy with and merely want to add a line or logo then you should use the simple copy and paste technique referred to earlier in these notes. The Master slide is particularly useful when you want to tweak a design or add features of your own and is idea for presentations with lots of slides.

To get at it, make sure you have a ‘normal’ slide selected – i.e. not a title slide or one where you have moved editing areas around already. Then use View | Master > Slide master and you’ll get a display like this:

The display shows the default text styles and areas for the design you’ve chosen – here they’re for just a standard ‘no template’ slide. You can change anything you want to. Typical things that you might wish to change are to move the Title area up to avoid the wasted space at the top, change text alignment from centre to left and remove bullets.

In the example below, changes to fonts and colours have also been made, and a horizontal graphic has been added below the title area.

A clock logo has been placed bottom left too. These changes will be made to every slide in the presentation where you have used one of the range of slide layouts offered (a good reason for sticking to them!) Slides where you have started with a blank sheet and added your own text areas will not usually be updated.

Once you’ve made some changes it is important to check how they have affected existing slides – sometimes further adjustments may be necessary as new features may overlap or text sizes become too big or small (size 24 in Times New Roman is significantly smaller than in Arial, for example).

Close Master slide will take you back to the slides’ normal view.

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