The PowerPoint slide master is the most important design element in every presentation. It serves as the basic template on which all your presentations are based and therefore significantly influences the appearance of your company. The slide master ensures a consistent design between different slides and presentations. A well-prepared PowerPoint slide master also saves a lot of work, as you do not have to design each slide individually - allowing you to concentrate fully on the content.
What exactly the PowerPoint slide master is and how you can create one yourself is explained here step-by-step.
In a nutshell, the PowerPoint slide master is a template that is automatically applied to all slides in a presentation. Especially for companies, a centralized PowerPoint slide master ensures that all presentations conform to the corporate design. The slide master is divided into two elements: the slide master layout and individual slide layouts.
Terminology can be somewhat confusing: the terms master slide and slide master are used synonymously. The term "master layout" is also used for the PowerPoint master slide. Technically, the “slide master” is the template behind a PowerPoint presentation, consisting of at least one master layout slide (which PowerPoint also calls a “slide master”) and multiple child layouts. You can have any number of master layout slides and child layouts. Confusing! But read on – we will make it all clear and easy to understand.
At the heart of every PowerPoint template is the master layout slide. Adjustments to a master layout are applied to all slides in a presentation. For example, if you insert the company logo in the upper right corner of the master layout, it will appear in the upper right corner of all slides. If you underline the title, every title within the presentation will be underlined automatically. The same applies to design, font, and all other properties. The master layout governs the core appearance of every slide in the presentation.
In addition to the PowerPoint master layout, slide layouts allow you to define the appearance of specific slide types. Thus, the appearance of the slide master can be further adapted to specific slide types: for example, title slides can have a different design than slides containing text or images.
When creating a new slide, you can choose from the different layouts. Note that adjustments to the master layout are also transferred to all slide layouts. Any company can benefit from a well-designed PowerPoint slide master - it offers the best solution to create different PowerPoint presentations with a uniform appearance.
Now we will explain what to consider when creating a PowerPoint Master.
There are a lot of things to consider when creating a slide master. The following steps guide you through the most important points when creating an optimal PowerPoint master.
All these aspects and even more things you can consider can be found in our PowerPoint Master checklist.
Now that you know what the PowerPoint slide master is and where to find it, you have countless options for giving your presentations an innovative, structured design. To get the most out of your PowerPoint slide master, empower® offers many features that ensure that the design you develop is correctly implemented in all presentations. That way, old presentations can also be updated to your new slide design easily and automatically. Find out more about the features of empower®.