Each time you apply a new theme to your slides, a slide master appears in the background.
We can't see it right now, but the slide master stores information about the theme such as
font style, colors, effects, placeholder size, text alignment, and more.
So, what can you do with the slide master? Well, imagine that you like this theme, but
you want to change specific design elements. Maybe you want your slide titles to be center
aligned instead of left aligned or a square bullet instead of a circle.
Or maybe you want to add a line under each slide title.
How can you make changes like these without changing each slide individually? The answer
is simple - make the changes on the slide master.
You can use the slide master to change any of these themes or you can select the Office
theme and basically design your own slides from scratch.
Since the Office theme has a default white background and Calibri font, it's like having
a blank canvas to work with. Let's take a look at the slide master.
Just select View on the Ribbon and click the Slide Master command in the Presentation Views
group. This opens the slide master view so that you
can change the design and layout of the master slides.
You'll see that after we clicked the command, a new Slide Master tab appeared as the active
tab on the Ribbon. This look is similar to Normal view, but we
aren't looking at our actual slides - we're looking at the master slides.
We have a pane on the left that includes thumbnail images of the slides, and a main slide pane.
The slide that is selected on the left is the one that is displayed in the slide pane
just like in Normal view. This first slide that is selected is the slide
master. All the slides beneath this one that are connected
with brackets are supporting layouts. If you hover over them, screen tips explain
that they are masters for various layouts. We can see that the Title and Content Layout
is used by several slides in our presentation, the Section Header layout is used by only
two slides, and this Title Only Layout is not used in our presentation.
If you want to make a change to all the slides in the presentation, you will edit the slide master.
Let's go ahead and do that.
Do you remember that I said the default font for the Office theme is Calibri? Let's change
that for all the slides, and make some other formatting changes.
In Slide Master view, select the slide master. Now, in the Edit Theme group, just click the
Fonts command. As I hover over each, a live preview of the
fonts will appear on the master slide. I like this one that uses the Lucida font.
Now I can see that it has changed on the slide master and in all the layouts.
Let's make another change to all our slides that will be more noticeable.
I want to change the title of each slide so that text is left- aligned and the font color
is orange. First, I need to select the title on the slide
master. I can't make this change from the Slide Master
tab like I could with the font theme change, so I need to click the Home tab to access
the commands I need. When I do this, the slide master and layouts
remain in the pane on the left because we are still in Slide Master view even though
we aren't using that tab right now. I can use the Font Color command in the Font
group to change the title text to orange and the alignment commands to left-align the title
text on all the slides. Once I make these changes on the Home tab,
I can select the Slide Show view command and see those changes on the slides.
The font is different, and the titles are orange and left-aligned.
When you are ready, you can just press the Esc key and return to the Slide Master tab.