Today we’ll be looking at PowerPoint templates and slide masters: what they are, and how they form the groundwork of a solid presentation.
PowerPoint Templates and Slide Masters
PowerPoint templates and slide masters are layout tools that enable you to maintain uniform design and formatting.
Presentations are one of the principal business tools you will use to communicate with your audience, so a branded corporate template is as important as your company’s website or other marketing collateral.
PowerPoint Templates
Think of your template as a blueprint that you will use for creating company presentations – it’s a framework that can prescribe layouts, visuals, colours, fonts and even effects for your team to use.
Templates offer uniformity and control over visuals, and are vital to projecting a quality image of your brand in face-to-face communications. By having your team make use of the same template, you can ensure that they’ll be maintaining a consistent brand identity when representing the company.
A corporate template also saves you and your colleagues time when putting together presentations. There is already a key visual asset in place that you can build your content on top of, so you won’t need to start from scratch with every new presentation.
Of course, you’ll want to build bespoke presentations and elements for key business events and opportunities, but a strong template can service day-to-day credentials, marketing, sales, training and reporting presentations with minimum hassle.
Use PowerPoint’s Slide Master tool to create a slick and impactful template that can be adapted to suit multiple use cases.
PowerPoint Slide Masters
Ever been listening to a presentation when you’ve noticed discrepancies as the speaker transitions from slide to slide? Maybe the alignment of a text box changes, or the position of their company logo shifts slightly? This incongruity can be jarring and distracting, but is easy to avoid using PowerPoint’s Slide Master tool.
To create a PowerPoint template, select View then Slide Master.
In the sidebar, you’ll be presented with thumbnails representing a hierarchy of slide types. Changes made to the slide represented by the largest thumbnail will be implemented across all other slide layouts (represented in the side panel as smaller thumbnails), but at the same time you can edit individual layouts to best serve different content purposes within this overarching design scheme.
The beauty of the slide master is that it allows you to implement universal design changes across slides in your presentation. This ensures a great degree of consistency and accuracy.
You can also select default colours, fonts and backgrounds for your template within the slide master view – as well as associating layouts with transitions and animations using the corresponding tabs.
Remember to enter instructions as to what type of content goes within each placeholder in your template, and once you have everything set up as desired use the Save As function and select the PowerPoint Template file format (.potx extension). Hey presto, you now have a PowerPoint template that you can share with colleagues to keep everything on-brand.
