Microsoft PowerPoint –Slide Master vs Slide Layouts

Microsoft PowerPoint –Slide Master vs Slide Layouts

Slide Layouts

A slide layout contains placeholders for text, videos, pictures, charts, shapes, clip art, a background, and more. They also contain the formatting, such as theme colours, fonts, and effects, for those objects.

Note: Every theme (palette of colours, fonts, and special effects) you use in your presentation includes one slide master and a set of related layouts. If you use more than one theme in your presentation, you’ll have more than one slide master and multiple sets of layouts.

You can change the slide layouts that are built in to PowerPoint in Slide Master view. The screen shots below show the slide master and two of the ten layouts for the Basis theme in Slide Master view:

 

Slide Master

When you want all your slides to contain the same fonts and images (such as logos), you can make those changes to the Slide Master, and they'll be applied to all your slides. The master slide is the top slide in the thumb nail pane on the left side of the screen.

Related Slide Layouts

The related slide layouts appear just below the Slide Master. The majority of changes that you make will most likely be to the Slide Layouts related to the master. When you are laying out the content in your slides, you can pick the slide layouts that best suit your content.

Tip: It is a good idea to edit your slide master and layouts before you start to build individual slides. If you edit the slide master or layouts after you build individual slides, you’ll need to reapply the changed layouts to the existing slides in your presentation in Normal view. Otherwise, you won’t see the changes in your slides.