Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

Step 3: Building the Show

It’s much better to show blank white slides containing an effective message than fancy graphics that don’t say anything. That’s why it’s an excellent idea to begin your presentation planning with the Outline pane. Once the outline’s in good shape, it’s time to start thinking about the cosmetics—how your slides look. PowerPoint’s tools make it easy to adapt your design (or Microsoft’s design) for all the slides simultaneously.

Warning

Choose File → Page Setup and set the Size options before you design your slides. A radical change to these options later in the game may result in cut off graphics or unintended distortions, as though your slides were being projected through a fun-house mirror. PowerPoint’s standard setting, On-screen Show (4:3), is the one to use for display with a video projector.

Using Masters

In the same way that slide themes let you alter the look of your presentation in a flash, slide masters save time by letting you make changes that apply to the entire theme, or just certain layouts (Figure 16-5). Background master items appear on every slide, unless you specify otherwise (see Hiding slides). When you add, delete, move, or replace a background master item, you see the change reflected in all of your slides that use it. For example, if you want to add a company logo to all your slides, just place it on the slide master; PowerPoint updates all the slides instantly. Other master items serve as placeholders for the title and bullet text. Changes ...