Forum Discussion
How to find master slides being used?
In the slide master if you mouse over any of the slides a pop-up shows how many slides are using the slide layout. How do you find out which slides are using a specific layout? I have some duplicate slides in my slide master and some of them are only used once by a slide. I want to find that one slide and change the layout so I can get rid of the duplicate in the slide layout.
Hi Sarah,
Our training courses are very modular. Each module is developed as if it were a separate training course. When we create a new full course we import all the individual parts into an SL-file. With this, all master-files are imported as well Some functionality is to be kept on 1 master slide. So we re-apply the master on all our imported slides.
The slidemaster we don't need we delete. Sometimes we forget to re-apply the master on a slide and can therefore not delete the master. To identify that slide, we change the background colour of the master slide we want to delete to, in our case red. When we then look at our course in course view, the slide stands out...
Cheers
geert
There's no such thing as "an old thread"- great tips are timeless and here's an example. Thanks Geert.
This is a brilliant workaround, Geert!
Very good, I like that
I recently found a solution to the impossible-to-find '1 slide' that used a particular Slide Master, even after going through every slide. A Draw from Question Bank uses the 'Blank' slide layout from whatever the first / top Slide Master is. It can't be changed, or even seen, at the slide level because the draw is not itself a slide. The solution is to delete the draw, then delete the now-orphaned Slide Master, and re-create the draw (which will now use the 'current' or top Master Slide blank layout. Hope this helps!
OK well, that actually makes sense. I don't have time to recreate 30 'draws' for each of my presentations but at least I will know for new presentations moving forward. Thanks for sharing!
Hi Alan,
No way to currently find that out. It would make a great feature request though.
Always Happy to Help,
Adrian
I see that this was asked back in 2012. Has this feature been added yet? I would love to be able to track down exactly which slides are using a specific master.
Cheers!
Sarah
Geert's trick is clever, simple and awesome! I love a quick and easy work-around for a missing function like this. Thanks very much!
Love when older threads are continuing to assist users and thank you for popping in to share Kendra.
Hi Debbie,
You can do the same thing with Feedback Masters. I put a big red X on the ones I want to get rid of. Then you just have to go through each quiz slide and check each feedback layer until you find the offending ones. It's kind of tedious and there should be an easier way but that's what I do.
I also had this recently, i was trying to locate a slide that was using a master in a file I was given to update. However the slide master in use was completely covered by content (A WHITE SHAPE!) on the slide so even when I put a shape on the slide master I couldn't see it. I got around this by adding a trigger to the offending slide master to show layer on timeline start, put my red shape on a layer instead and previewed the course.. That really worked a treat, I hope it helps someone.
Is there a potential bug with this? I have a slide master that states there are 8 slides using it. However, I have gone through all content and set it to another slide master. I also, put a large red square covering the entire slide master that states there are 8 slides using it and it does not show up in the content. Puzzled...
Ah, makes sense. Something is telling me the layers are defaulting to Feedback Layers, which you may not have created to go along with your slide master. Quick way to tell is to create a new Feedback layer master and seeing if your new layer(s) will take that style. If not, you're probably starting from scratch as you suggesting.
