Now that you understand the basics of a theme, you will be able to see how these choices affect objects in your presentation but the most important things that affect your slides are the slide masters and layouts. Slide masters and layouts are really what slides are based on. They are how you make sure your presentation is consistent, that the titles are on the same place, they do not jump from slide to slide, that all slide use the theme fonts, that all slide use the same colors, all that kind of stuff, the really the best way to save yourself a ton of work. So instead of formatting each slide individually, you just format the slide master and the layout and then all slides that are bases on that master and layout are formatted automatically, so they really do make your life easier.

So, let us look at masters and layouts. To do that, click on the View tab and choose Slide Master. The first thing to understand is that the big thumbnail up here is called the Slide Master. Of the little thumbnails below that are individual slide layouts and they actually inherit their settings from the slide master. This individual slide layouts are what show up in the New Slide gallery on Home tab and if you have more than one slide master, you will get another section in that gallery on the Home tab. I will show you that in a minute. These text boxes that show up automatically on the slide master that say Click to Edit, are called placeholders, right here, right here and these three at the bottom. Now, you can turn these three on or off all at once on the individual slide layouts by checking the Footers button. You can do the same with the title placeholder. It is really better to turn this off than it is to just delete them altogether.

Now, to show you an example of how changing something on your slide master affects the individual slide layout, let me increase the size of the thumbnail pane so that you can see what I am doing. To do that, you just click and drag and then we will click on the slide master up here at the top. If I select this black bar and change its color, you will see the color change on all the various individual layouts. Now, it does not change on the title slide and section slide layouts but it just change most of the others.

Now, let me press Control-Z to undo that. Now, let me change the color on the slide title, I will right click to select the mini tab and I will choose a different font color. Now, you can see that the slide title color change throughout all of the layouts on every single one of them. PowerPoint assumes that you want all of the title text to be the same color. You can also go in and change this on individual slide layouts if you want. So for instance, I could go in and make the title text on all of the title slides, green. Right click to open a mini bar, choose the Text Color to change the text color.

Now, I rather like having all the title text green, so I am going to press Control-Z to undo those changes we just made and now I am back to green on all of my masters slide and slide layouts. I also want to add a logo to the slide masters so that there is a logo on every slide. To do this, I will use insert picture and we will select the logo picture and we will click insert, navigate to your Project Files folder, navigate to Chapter 2, choose this logo and click insert. We will just click and drag to position this in the lower left hand corner. Now, if I scroll with this slide thumbnail pane, you can see that logo appears on every slide except the title slide, the section slide, and the blank layouts slide. Now, we can add the logo to those layouts by selecting it on the master slide, remember the one up here at the top, right click, choose Copy, select the appropriate layout, right click and choose paste and put it on the section layout, we will leave it off from the blank slide layout because the blank slide layout generally is truly blank.