Microsoft® PowerPoint® 2010 Bible

Chapter 5. Working with Layouts, Themes, and Masters

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Changing a slide's layout

• Applying a theme

• Customizing theme formatting

• Specifying repeated elements

• Modifying a slide layout

• Creating a new slide layout

• Managing themes and layouts

• Storing themes in custom templates

Most presentations consist of multiple slides, so you'll need a way of ensuring consistency among them. Not only will you want each slide (in most cases) to have the same background, fonts, and text positioning, but you will also want a way of ensuring that any changes you make to those settings later automatically populate across all your slides.

To accomplish these goals, PowerPoint offers layouts, themes, and masters. Layouts determine the positioning of placeholders; themes assign color, font, and background choices; and masters transfer theme settings to the slides and provide an opportunity for repeated content, such as a logo, on each slide. In this chapter you learn how to use layouts, themes, and masters to create a presentation that is attractive, consistent, and easy to manage.

Understanding Layouts and Themes

As you learned in Chapter 4, a layout is a positioning template. The layout used for a slide determines what content placeholders will appear and how they will be arranged. For example, the default layout, called Title and Content, contains a placeholder for a title across the top of the slide and a multipurpose placeholder for body content in the center.

A theme is a group of design settings. ...