Now, I am going to make a new slide layout. We’re going to use the slide layout to introduce the different people who will run our restaurant. I can copy an existing layout. If I want to insert a new one and start from scratch, just right click and choose insert new layout. So, as you can see, when you insert a new layout, you get one that looks pretty much like the slide master, just the plain white background, the black bar surrounding the title area at the top. I would prefer to add a slide layout that looks a little closer to the section header layout. So, I am going to delete this layout by right clicking and choosing delete layout. And then I am going to select the section header layout, right click and choose duplicate layout. And as you can see right below it, I have to do to duplicate layout.

Now, I can rename this so I know what layout I am working with. I will name it “Bio Sketch”. Click “Enter” to accept that change. This layout needs to have the person’s name, their position and a bit of text about them. And ideally, it will have a picture of them as well. So, to get started, I am going to move these placeholders a little bit out of the way so that we have room for a picture placeholder. I am going to click this placeholder, press Shift and click the subtitle placeholder and then when my arrow cursor changes to two-headed arrow, I will click and drag to the right and I will release the Shift button. Then on the ribbon, I will choose insert placeholder, select picture and click and drag to insert a picture placeholder.

At the bottom of the slide, we will add a placeholder for the person’s biographical information. Again, choose insert placeholder. And this time, we will choose text. And we will click and drag to create a text placeholder. Now, we do not need all of these bullets for what might be kind of a paragraph of text. So, we will select all of this and we will just click and type, add bio info here. This is actually called custom prompt text and it is very handy for you users so that they know what kind of information to add and what placeholder. It helps them know what the intention of the slide layout is.

So, I will change the prompt’s text here also, add position here. And in the top placeholder, we will add the person’s name. We want to make sure that all of our text boxes are properly aligned on the slide So, I am pressing Shift. We selected the first placeholder, the second placeholder and the third placeholder. If you inadvertently select something on your slide, just keep pressing the Shift button and click the item again. That will deselect it. Now that we have all three placeholder selected, we can align them using the drawing tools format tab. Choose align, align left and you will see that all of the placeholders jump into place and they are perfectly aligned on the left edges.

So now, we come close out of master view by going to slide master. I am choosing close master view and we will look on the Home tab at the new slide gallery. You will see that our new bio sketch layout shows up on the list right here. So, it is there and available for us to select whenever we are ready to create a bio slide. So as you can see this gallery can get pretty crowded pretty fast. So, be sure to delete any extraneous slide layouts or masters that you know you will not need to use. That will help keep this gallery clean and make it easy to select the type of slide layout you want to use.

There are a couple of other things in slide master view you want to know about. So go back here to view slide master, page set up. This is where you can change the size of your PowerPoint slide. The default is as an onscreen show with the 4 x 3 aspect ratio, 16 x 9 and 16 x 10 aspect ratios are new in PowerPoint 2007. You want to change this size before you actually create your slides, otherwise all of the objects on your slide will become distorted and you will have to do a lot of manual resizing.

You also want to take a look at slide orientation. You have Portrait or Landscape options and you can only have one or the other in eac