In the corporate world, there is a tendency to want to brand every slide with your company logo.  Even worse, use the company colours and washed out ‘people shaking hands’ image that the CEO demands is on every slide.  How can you make sure that the logo or image appear on every slide?  By putting them into the Slide Master.

Think of the Slide Master as the ‘head honcho’ slide.  All the other slides in your presentation look up the the Slide Master, and copy (inherit) whatever the Slide Master look like.  Generally, if you place the company logo on the bottom right of the Slide Master, every slide in your presentation will have the company logo on the bottom right of the slide.

That is all well and good, but how do you get to the slide master view, especially since the user interface has changed in PowerPoint 2007?

1) Click the ‘View’ Ribbon Tab, then in the Presentation views group, select ‘Slide Master’

or

2) In the bottom right hand corner of the screen (just to the left of the zoom slider) hold shift and click ‘Normal Layout’.  This will switch to the master slide view.  To change back to the normal layout, just click normal layout, normally.  See the image below which explains it far better.

(PS - the pen work in the above image was created using a very bad mouse and the most powerful program in Windows - MSPAINT!  If anyone has a spare tablet (or tablet PC for that matter) that they want to permanently lend me, please let me know!)

tags: help, powerpoint2007, slide master