PowerPoint Template Basics

When you’re setting up a brand new PowerPoint Template, one of the first things you should do is to look at your new PowerPoint document in Master View. To find it, go to the top of your screen and look for the View tab, from that go to Master and finally Slide Master.
That will bring you to a grouping of pre-formatted slides. This is your starting point. The program gives you some basic slide layouts that you can modify as you see fit. So you can go in and change font styles, sizes, and colors as well as add rules, logos, or any other design elements you would like repeated on all the slides without having to manually put them in each time you want to use that layout. One thing that I always like to do is to trash what I don’t need. There are two layouts in particular that have text running vertically up the side so that you literally have to turn your head until your neck hurts just to read it. Nobody in their right mind should consider using any layout that makes the viewer strain their eyes or contort their bodies while you are presenting. Sure you could just leave those ugly layouts in the master and just not apply them to your slides. But as we all know, slide presentations often change hands within a corporate environment. There’s always a risk that one or two people may choose to get “creative” and build their portion of the presentation using some of these “wacky” layouts just to be “different”. As someone who’s job it is to make a PowerPoint presentation look corporate and reduce the chances of any internal design mishaps, I like to clean up some of these master slides so that once the PowerPoint is out of my hands, I can rest comfortably knowing that the bad design elements have been removed and even if there are changes made down the road, the presentation will still conform to certain design standards set up at the very beginning.