LyteByte

This is a guest post by Kyle Judkins from www.lostintechnology.com

The Slide Master in PowerPoint from Office 2007 is a powerful tool that allows you to edit the format of all of your slides in one place.  It allows you to add pictures, edit fonts, change footers and much more.  The best part is that all of these changes will be added to every slide in your presentation.  This makes developing those custom templates extremely easy.

The first thing you want to do is locate the Slide Master.  You can find it by clicking on the View tab and selecting Slide Master.

Once you open the Slide Master view, you will see several slides on the left side of the screen that looks just like a presentation.  The reason for all the slides is so you can edit every type of slide layout, but I find that to be a little too much customization for my tastes.  For your basic edits, you are going to want to stick with the top slide. 

Once you click on the top slide, it will appear in your main window.  Here is where you are going to make all of your changes.  Now, I am going to show you an example of the uses of the Slide Master.  I decided to change the title font to Wingdings, add a clip art lighthouse, change the top font to read, and add a footer and a date (side note: if you want the footer and date changes to show up you must enable them in the Insert tab).  These are all amazingly professional changes, and I won’t be mad if you choose to use them yourself.

Now you can go back to the Normal view and look at how you’ve changed all of the slides in your presentation.

As you can see, this should save you time and make you a little less angry when making up those custom slide templates in the future.

Kyle Judkins is a 24 year old marketer and part-time tech blogger.  He is the author of LostInTechnology where he talks about some basic technology tips and tricks that everyone can use. You can subscribe to his posts for more tips like this.