PowerPoint 2007 for Starters: The Missing Manual

Editing Slide and Layout Masters

Slide masters and layout masters determine the initial look of every single slide in your slideshow. For example, if you place one background image, three text placeholders, and a date-and-time footer on a slide master, then every slide in your slideshow will contain the same background image, the same three text placeholders positioned in the same spots, and the same date-and-time footer.

In fact, you've been using slide masters without even knowing it. Whenever you choose a theme for your presentation, you're actually applying a set of slide masters. A theme (Section 1.2) is nothing more than a collection of masters. More specifically, a theme includes a slide master and a handful of layout masters packaged in a special file format (.thmx) so that you can easily apply them to different presentations.

The purpose of slide masters is to help you create an attractive, cohesive-looking slideshow: Make a change once, and it appears on dozens of slides instantly. And because PowerPoint lets you override the slide master by editing individual slides directly, you're not locked into an all-or-nothing look.

But if you want to tweak a theme or create your own—in other words, if you want to add the same color scheme, formatting, or object (graphic, text, background, and so on) to multiple slides—then you need to learn to how masters work. Fortunately, editing PowerPoint's masters is just as easy as editing any other slide. The only difference is that you're ...