Managing Slide Masters in PowerPoint 2010

Let’s review the relationship one more time between slide masters and themes. A theme is a set of formatting specs (colors, fonts, and effects) that can be  used in PowerPoint, Word, or Excel. Themes are not applied directly to slides — they are applied to slide masters, which govern the formatting of slides.  The slide masters exist within the presentation file itself.

You can change them by applying different themes, but they are essentially ‘‘built in’’ to the presentation file.

When you change to a different theme for all of the slides in the presentation, your slide master changes its appearance. You can tweak that appearance  in Slide Master view. As long as all of the slides in the presentation use the same theme, you need only one slide master. However, if you apply a different  theme to some of your slides, you need another master, because a master can have only one theme applied to it at a time. PowerPoint  automatically creates the additional master(s) for you, and they are all available for editing in Slide Master view.

If you later reapply a single theme to all of the slides in the presentation, you do not need multiple masters anymore, so the unused one is automatically  deleted. In addition to all this automatic creation and deletion of slide masters, you can also manually create and delete slide masters on your own. Any  slide masters that you create manually are automatically preserved, even if they aren’t always in use. You must manually delete them if you don’t  want them anymore.

In the following sections, you learn how to create and delete slide masters manually, and how to rename them. You also learn how to lock one of the  automatically created slide masters so that PowerPoint does not delete it if it falls out of use. Creating and Deleting Slide Masters To create another slide  master, click Insert Slide Master on the Slide Master tab. It appears below the existing slide master(s) in the left pane of Slide Master view. From there,  just start customizing it.

You can apply a theme to it, modify its layouts and placeholders, and all the usual things you can do to a slide master. Another way to create a new slide  master is to duplicate an existing one. To do this, right-click the slide master and choose Duplicate Master.

To delete a slide master, select it in Slide Master view (make sure you select the slide master itself, not just one of its layouts) and press the Delete key. If  any of that slide master’s layouts were applied to any slides in the presentation, those slides automatically convert to the default slide master’s  equivalent layout. If no exact layout match is found, PowerPoint does its best:

It uses its default Title and Content layout and includes any extra content as orphaned items.

Renaming a Slide Master Slide master names appear as category headings on the Layout list as you are selecting layouts. For example, in Figure 5-20,  the slide master names are Apex and Check.

 

To rename a slide master, follow these steps:

1. In Slide Master view, right-click the slide master and choose Rename Master. The Rename Master dialog box opens.

2. Type a new name for the master, replacing the existing name.

3. Click Rename.

Preserving a Slide Master Unless you have created the slide master yourself, it is temporary. Slide masters come and go as needed, as you format slides  with various themes. To lock a slide master so that it doesn’t disappear when no slides are using it, right-click the slide master and choose Preserve  Master.

A check mark appears next to Preserve Master on its right-click menu, indicating it is saved. To un-preserve it, select the command again to toggle the  check mark off. See Figure 5-21.

Managing Themes  As you learned earlier in the chapter, themes are applied to slide masters to create the background, color, font, and effect formatting  for a presentation. Some themes are built into PowerPoint, and you can also create and save your own themes as separate files and apply them to other  presentations or even to other Office documents, such as in Word and Excel. In this section you learn how to create new themes, manage theme files, and  apply themes across multiple presentations. Creating a New Theme To create a new theme, first format a slide master exactly the way you want,  including any custom layouts, backgrounds, colors, and font themes. Then save the slide master’s formatting as a new theme by following these steps:

1. On the Slide Master or the Design tab, click Themes, and click Save Current Theme. The Save Current Theme dialog box opens.  The default location  shown in the Save Current Theme dialog box under Windows Vista or Windows 7 is C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates\ Document Themes.  For Windows XP, it is C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates\Document Themes.

2. Type a name for the theme file in the File Name text box.

3. Click Save. The new theme is saved to your hard disk. The new theme is now available from the Themes button’s menu in all presentations you create while logged in as the same user on the same PC. All of its formatting is available, including any custom color or font themes it includes. You can use it in  other programs too; in Word or Excel, choose Page Layout ➪ Themes in one of those programs. Renaming a Theme You can rename a theme file by  renaming the .thmx file from Windows Explorer, outside of PowerPoint. You can also rename a theme file from inside PowerPoint by using any dialog box that saves or opens files. For example, to use the Choose Theme or Themed Document dialog box to rename a theme, follow these steps:

1. From the Design or Slide Master tab, click Themes, and choose Browse for Themes. The Choose Theme or Themed Document dialog box opens.

2. Navigate to the folder containing the theme file to rename.

 By default, theme files are stored under Windows Vista or Windows 7 in: C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates\Document  Themes.  For Windows XP, it is C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates\Document Themes.

3. Right-click the theme file and choose Rename.

4. Type the new name for the theme and press Enter.

5. Click Cancel to close the dialog box.

Deleting a Theme A custom theme file continues appearing on the Themes gallery indefinitely. If you want to remove it from there, you must delete it  from the Document Themes folder, or move it to some other location for storage. To delete a theme, follow these steps:

1. From the Design or Slide Master  tab, click Themes, and choose Browse for Themes. The Choose Theme or Themed Document dialog box opens.

2. Navigate to the folder containing the theme files:

 In Windows Vista or Windows 7: C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\ Templates\Document Themes.  In Windows XP: C:\Documents and  Settings\username\Application Data\Microsoft\ Templates\Document Themes.

3. Right-click the theme file and choose Delete.

4. At the Delete File confirmation box, click Yes.

5. Click Cancel to close the dialog box.

Copying a Theme from Another Presentation A presentation file ‘‘contains’’ themes, in that the themes are applied to its slide masters. (That’s how a  template contains themes too.) As you learned earlier, you can preserve a slide master in Slide Master view so that it doesn’t get deleted automatically  when there are no slides based on it; by creating new slide masters, applying themes to them, and then preserving them, you can create a whole library  of themes in a single presentation or template file. Then to make this library of themes available in another presentation, you simply base the new  presentation on that existing presentation (or template).

However, if you did not initially base the new presentation on the template or presentation that contains the theme you want, you can apply the theme  from it after the fact. One way to do this is to copy and paste (or drag and drop) the slide master from one file’s Slide Master view to the other’s.

Follow these steps to copy a slide master (and thereby copy its theme) to another presentation:

1. Open both presentations.

2. In the presentation that contains the theme, enter Slide Master view (View  Slide Master).

3. Select the slide master (top slide in the left pane) and press Ctrl+C to copy it.

4. Switch to the other presentation (View ➪ Switch Windows).

5. Enter Slide Master view (View ➪ Slide Master).

6. Press Ctrl+V to paste the slide master (and its associated theme and layouts). Summary In this chapter you learned how themes and slide masters  make it easy to apply consistent formatting in a presentation, and how layout masters are associated with slide masters and provide consistent layouts  for the slides based on them. You learned how to create, edit, rename, and delete themes, masters and layouts, and how to copy themes between  presentations. Now that you know how to format entire presentations using themes, you’re ready to start learning how to make exceptions to the  formatting rules that the themes impose. In the next chapter you will learn how to format text in PowerPoint, and apply different fonts, sizes, attributes,  and special effects. You can use this knowledge to make strategic changes to the text placeholders on slide masters to further customize your themes, or  you can make changes to text on individual slides on a case-by-case basis to make certain slides stand out from the rest.