10.1 The slide master and a real theme

What you'll be able to do

Make a whole deck consistent by editing one place, the slide master. Turn that into a branded template your team can build on. And rescue a deck you inherited in a mess.

Before you start

Download the master rebuild practice deck. It is formatted slide by slide, by hand, inconsistently, the way real decks are.

The work

1. No documented keyboard shortcut for this — use the menu: open the machinery at View → Slide Master. The left pane shows one large master slide, with its family of layouts beneath it. Here is how they inherit. The master sets the defaults: fonts, colours, background and footer. Each layout adapts those for one kind of slide, such as a title slide, a content slide or a section header. Every ordinary slide follows its layout. Edit the master's title font and watch every layout, and so every slide, take it up. This is the styles idea from Word, in slides.
2. No documented keyboard shortcut for this — use the menu: set the theme rather than colouring shapes one by one. Still in master view, the Slide Master tab holds Colors, Fonts and Effects. Define the palette, which the design lesson sets at three colours plus a neutral, and the two typefaces, once, here. From then on the theme colours appear first in every colour picker, and "accent 1" means the same thing on every slide. Recolouring a deck later becomes re-picking the theme, instead of a tour of the slides.
3. Same either way: adjust the layouts for the jobs the deck really has. Click each layout the deck uses, and move, resize or delete its placeholders, which is the slides-and-layouts lesson's word. Put the title lower on section headers, or add a caption placeholder on the picture layout. Close Master View and insert slides with Ctrl+M. The layout gallery, at Alt+H, L, now offers your layouts.
4. Same either way: save the result as a template the moment it is right. Press F12 and choose PowerPoint Template (.potx). It is the .dotx story from Word exactly: File → New opens fresh copies, the master file stays clean, and the shared drive holds the team's one source.
5. Same either way: here is the rescue procedure for a deck you inherited, and it is a rebuild rather than a repair. Open your template as a new deck. Bring the old deck's slides across with Home → New Slide → Reuse Slides, or by pasting them, taking care to keep the destination formatting. The slides land on your master and take its look. What is left over is the hand-drawn text boxes, which obey no master, as the layouts lesson warned, and those are retyped into real placeholders. An hour of rebuilding beats a week of chasing formatting from slide to slide, and that is the honest arithmetic.

Try it

Open the practice deck and confirm that the mess is per-slide formatting. Build a small branded master, with theme colours and fonts and three adjusted layouts. Save it as a .potx. Then rescue the practice deck onto it by reusing and retyping, and count the minutes against what slide-by-slide repair would have cost.

Check yourself