Creating Your Own Slide Masters

Now that we have our course design and assets created, we can start customizing our Slide Masters. Working from PowerPoint's built-in layouts, we'll create new layouts based on the designs we created earlier.

If you're following along, I'm working in Lesson Files > Chapter_04 > DesignComp_Start.pptx.

STEP 1: Create a New Presentation

It's a good idea to create a new presentation at this point. This will be our foundation for the course, so it's best to begin with a fresh file.

  1. Click File > New > Blank Presentation to create a new file
  2. Right-click the first slide and change the layout from Title Slide to Title Only

We applied the Title Only layout to make that a "used" layout. In the next step, we'll delete all unused layouts and build our new layout from the Title Only layout.

STEP 2: Delete Unused Slide Layouts

Using the Title Only layout as a starting point, we'll build custom layouts with PowerPoint's Text and Image Placeholders.

  1. Click View > Slide Master
  2. Shift-click all Slide Layouts except the Title Only layout
  3. Click Delete to remove the selected layouts

These steps are more housekeeping steps than anything else. By default, PowerPoint includes a dozen Slide Master layouts you won't use in this project. They clutter our workspace, so we deleted them.

In the next step, we'll work from the Title Only layout to build our custom layout.

STEP 3: Customize the Title Only Slide master

  1. Open DesignComp.pptx if it's not already open. This is the general design layout for our course.
  2. Press Control-A to select everything on the slide
  3. Press Control-C to copy the objects
  4. Switch back to your new presentation
  5. Go to View > Slide Master
  6. Select the Title Only Layout, press Control-V to paste the copied graphics
  7. Shift-click the Text Placeholders you just created
  8. Press Delete to remove the text boxes. We're deleting the text boxes because we're going to re-create them using Text Placeholders.
  9. Select the background image (bg-main.png) and press Control-X to cut it from the Title Only layout
  10. Select the top Slide Master and press Control-V to paste bg-main.png
  11. Right-click bg-main.png and choose Send to Back to put the background image on the bottom layer
  12. Save your file

Okay, quick progress check. First, we deleted unused Layout Slides from our Slide Master. Next, we copied our design comp graphics to the Slide Master. And finally, we moved the background image to the Slide Master because this element is persistent across multiple layouts.

What's Next?

In the next lesson we'll work with PowerPoint's Text and Image Placeholders to create custom placeholders for our slides.

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