- What Designers Think About
- Using the PowerPoint Design Templates
- Creating a Branded Template
- Fine-Tuning Color Schemes
- Saving Your Design Templates
- Understanding the Role of Masters
- Final Design Touches
- Losing the Extraneous Placeholders
- What About Fonts?
- Designing for Handouts
- Using Third-Party Design Tools
- Dramatic 3D Animated Designs with OfficeFX
- Looking Ahead: PowerPoint 2007
- Case Study: Creating Design Templates for a Travel Agency
- Summary
- Resources
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Understanding the Role of Masters
Earlier in this chapter, we mentioned the use of multiple Masters within a single presentation to place a logo in different parts of the background for different slides (refer to Figure 2-10).
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With these multiple Masters created, any one or more of them can be applied to one or more slides by selecting them in Slide Sorter view.
Most people use Masters in two ways:
- First, by putting the logo on the Master wherever you choose, you can quickly customize a presentation by applying that master to various slides—they will all share that look.
- Then, by reformatting specific elements within the master, you can quickly make a similar set of changes automatically within of lots of slides at once.
Let's see how and why that works.
As already mentioned, the Slide Master is essentially a blueprint for all slides based on it. And it's very powerful—imagine if in the real world you could build some condos based on a blueprint, and then if you changed the dimensions of the shower in the blueprint, the showers in all of the condos automatically had their dimensions changed correspondingly!
If we click View > Slide Master and return to the three extra Masters we created (but never applied) with the logos in different positions, we should also see that their Title text color is still the blue we created originally—we never changed it to match our template using the custom Color Scheme.
In fact, the Bullet text color is still the hideous black that came with the original ugly white blank template. Remember, we simply created these Masters using the Create New Master button on the Slide Master view toolbar; only the first master has been applied to the actual three slides in our design template presentation.
In Figure 2-19, we can see our current situation, with the third master selected and visible in the preview window and its logo in the lower-left corner.
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Figure 2-19 In this Slide Master view, we have created three new Masters, one of which is selected and previewed. Only the first master has actually been applied in the presentation itself.
So just for the heck of it, let's work with this third master.
Let's pretend that your Human Resources director insisted that any slides dealing with his portion of the presentation needed a "totally different look and feel."
You know better than to lock horns with the HR person. Your paycheck could get sent to Pago Pago.
So you go ahead and change the Title text color to a lighter lilac and the Bullet text to a lighter green, both reflected in the logo and loyal to the brand.
Then you use the Format > Background setting (in the Master view, not in the Normal Slide view), to change the background of this master to a dark gradient that resembles the older 35mm slides.
You select the Fill Effects in the Background panel and choose two dark colors for a two-color gradient, as shown in Figure 2-20.
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Figure 2-20 Manually changing the design of one of the Masters will allow you to quickly reformat a set of slides based on the master.
When you click Apply (not Apply to All!), this one radically different Master takes its place in your presentation in Slide Master view.
Just for good measure, let's conform it to the other applied master by giving it a solid light-colored line above the title and confining the bullet area so that it is anchored in the grid to allow for more space around it (see Figure 2-21).
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Figure 2-21 The Master is refined to conform to the main template, with a solid line above the title and a confined area for the bullets.
Obviously, our users can always change its dimensions, but not if our Human Resources Director publishes the specification in a policy manual with the template!
So now if we click Close Master View, we can return to the presentation and add a new slide for Human Resources.
Notice in Slide Sorter view that it has the attributes of the main template and the only master that has been applied so far, but all of the possible Masters are still visible in the Slide Design Task Pane.
This is the situation in Figure 2-22, where we have selected our new Human Resources slide in Slide Sorter view, and in the Slide Masters representing the templates within our presentation in the Slide Design Task Pane, we are about to apply the new master to Selected Slides.
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Figure 2-22 Slide Sorter view allows us to apply a specific template (based on the Master) to one or more selected slides.
When Apply to Selected Slides is clicked, the presentation is transformed.
Now the Human Resources Department has its own unique look, based on the newly revised master.
If we return to Normal view, as shown in Figure 2-23, and add another Human Resources slide directly after the one with the new Master, it has the same attributes and is ready for revision.
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Figure 2-23 With a new master applied, slides created directly following it will take on its characteristics.
Obviously, Masters are a powerful way to quickly reformat your presentation.