Get Help From a Master: PowerPoint Slide Formatting Give Your Slides Your Own Style Helen Bradley
Wed 9/18/02 -- Unless someone pays you by the hour to create Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, you probably want to get yours created quickly and efficiently so you can move onto other things. While PowerPoint can't help write persuasive content (that part is up to you), the program can automate some tiresome formatting chores -- it offers tools both for streamlining layout as you work on presentations and for saving or recycling your most attractive formats for future use.
Take advantage of slide masters. Every PowerPoint presentation has a Slide Master, and many have a separate Title Master -- tools that help you create a customized, consistent look for all the slides in your presentation. A Title Master, if present, controls the look of the presentation's title slides, while the Slide Master does the same for the remaining slides (or every slide if you don't use a Title Master).
When you use these masters to set formats for all slides, you save yourself from having to make changes to each slide individually. You can set your Slide Master before you begin, or at any time while you're designing the presentation. To find the masters, choose View/Master/Slide Master (or Title Master if you're using PowerPoint 2000).
In PowerPoint 2002, the Slide Master will appear on the screen and the thumbnail view will show the Title Master (if any). If there is no Title Master and you want one, create one by choosing Insert/New Title Master. To alter an element on either master, click an element to select it, then use the formatting options to make changes to it. To add your company logo or an appropriate image to all slides, use the Slide Master.
Paint your formats. Like Word and Excel, PowerPoint has a Format Painter which copies complex formatting from one piece of text so you can use the mouse to apply it to another. Click on the text whose format you wish to copy, then double-click the Format Painter button to copy it. Now click on each successive piece of text to receive the format to. When you're done, click the Format Painter button again or press the Escape key.
Recycling slides and formats. You can copy slides from one presentation to another -- they'll take on the formatting of the presentation they're copied into. Choose Insert/Slides from Files; click the Find Presentation tab; and open the source presentation. Select the slide or slides to copy and click Insert.
If you create a lot of identically formatted presentations (say, for a report updated monthly), it's even smarter to create a custom design template with all your settings in it. The easiest way to do this is to take an existing presentation which has all the elements you'll want to use, removing any slides you won't use in all presentations and including any slides you'll always use (such as a "Welcome" slide).
Choose File/Save As; give your design template a name; and choose Design Template (*.pot) from the "Save as type:" list box. Select your Templates folder as the location and choose Save.
To use this design template in future, choose File/New/From Design Template, then Browse to locate it. In versions prior to PowerPoint 2002, choose the General tab and pick your template to select it.
Finally, it's also possible to apply your design template to any existing presentation. Open the latter, then choose Format/Slide Design/Design Templates and choose your template (in PowerPoint 97 and 2000, choose Format/Apply Design Template, select your template, and click Apply).
Headers and footers. In addition to masters for overall design, PowerPoint slides also support headers and footers containing text to appear on all slides -- such as your company name, the date, or the slide number. To set these options, choose View/Header and Footer and specify whether to include the date, slide number, or other footer text to the slides.
Enable the "Don't show on title slide" option to leave the header and footer off your title slides if you like; then, click Apply to All. Should you wish to alter their appearance or placement, you'll find the placeholders for the header and footer items on the Slide Master.
Font find-and-replace. If you get caught making a PowerPoint presentation on a computer which doesn't have all the fonts you used to create the show, replace the missing ones with fonts the local machine does have. Choose Format/Replace Fonts; then, from the Replace and With lists, respectively, choose the presentation font that's missing from the PC and the one you'd like to swap into its stead. Click Replace to finish the job.
New line but no bullet. Finally, a free bonus PowerPoint trick: If you're familiar with Word, you may recall you can start a new line without creating a new paragraph by pressing Shift-Enter. The same keystrokes work in PowerPoint to create a new line on a slide as a continuation of an existing bullet point.
