iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Changing Slide Backgrounds

Every master slide has a background that matches the other slides in its theme. It’s usually a good idea to stick with these matching slide backgrounds for the sake of maintaining a consistent appearance throughout your slideshow. However, you may want to set off different segments of a presentation with different themes, or sometimes create a slide that diverges completely from the status quo.

To change the slide background, open the Slide Inspector and click the Appearance tab. The bottom section of the Inspector controls the slide background. Most slides that are part of a theme use an image fill background. Click the upper pop-up menu in the Background section and choose one of the following background fill types:

• None. As you might expect, this choice removes the background entirely, rendering the background white. This is as close as you can get to the retina-burning white screen of a jammed slide projector. Unless you’re going to be filling this white space with a lot of text or objects, it’s probably not a very good choice. Unlike the printed page, in the projection business white space is not your friend.

  Tip

  The None option is more useful when you want to export the slideshow in QuickTime format (see Creating a QuickTime Movie) for use in another video project. In that case, the background is actually transparent, so your slides and animations appear on whatever background you use in your video.

• Color Fill. If you choose this, a color well appears ...