A uniform “look and feel” is a sign of professionalism. No problem with the PowerPoint slide master.

A uniform and appealing corporate design is essential for every company. It ensures that customers recognize the company at first glance and link positive experiences with it. A high recognition value is important both when dealing with business partners in the B2B sector and when communicating with customers. Above all, however, it is important to ensure a uniform appearance at presentations at trade fairs or congresses.

When preparing a presentation, great attention should be paid to presentation design. It is crucial that certain elements are used repeatedly and are used equally by all employees in all presentations. Only if these elements are used uniformly will they remain in the memory of the presentation participants and be recognized everywhere and at all times.

A big advantage when working with the PowerPoint slide master is that the presentation preparation is done quickly. For example, a new presentation does not always have to start with “0”, but employees can access certain elements and forms of presentation. In addition, the individual slides can be adapted and extended as required without having to reopen the entire presentation.

The PowerPoint slide master ensures that all slides meet clearly defined design criteria. These criteria can be clearly defined in advance and applied to all presentations. This ensures, for example, that a uniform font is used and that certain elements such as the company logo are always placed in the same place. Elements such as footers, titles and background colors can also be defined. Once a setting has been made in the slide master, it applies to all slides and layouts used.

PowerPoint works with a so-called three-level model. The first level is the slide master itself. On the second level there are different layouts and the third level consists of individual slides. During work, all these layers are transparent and can be used in parallel and connected with each other. Anyone making changes to the slide master will automatically see them on the assigned slides. This principle makes it unnecessary to edit individual slides, making the preparation of presentations particularly efficient.

Even the creation of a separate master for each presentation can be saved by experienced PowerPoint users. It is important to create the slide master in such a way that the settings reflect the corporate design of your company. In addition, a style guide should be created that contains all the information about this corporate design. In addition, such a style guide should contain all specifications that apply to every presentation and must be taken into account by all employees. For particularly large companies, however, it makes sense to develop and use your own templates for different target groups and occasions.

If you are familiar with the functions of the slide master, you will quickly learn how to edit it and how to use the individual features sensibly. In order to get to the slide master, the steps “View -> Master views” must be performed in PowerPoint. Here you can call the slide master, whose look essentially corresponds to the standard view.

On the left side you will find various hierarchically arranged layouts. The top slide is the master slide, which can be recognized, among other things, by the fact that it is slightly larger than the other slides. The layouts below can be used for a presentation according to the three-level model or simply ignored.

For reasons of clarity, the individual presentation slides are not displayed in the slide master. If these are to be displayed, click on “Close master view”. Alternatively, the cards “View -> Normal” can be called up to view the individual slides.

The master slide can be adapted without great effort in such a way that it corresponds to your own wishes, ideas and requirements. It is advisable not to resort to standard layouts, but to choose the look of the slides in such a way that they reflect your own corporate design and thus ensure the highest possible recognition value.

Experienced PowerPoint users can use the “Insert placeholder” feature. Various placeholders are then available for selection, which can be used for their own presentation. The field “Colors” allows the background design. More than just the colors provided by Microsoft can be used, so that the colors can be optimally adapted to the corporate design of your company. The point “Fonts” is also important. The selected font should be the same for all presentations and match the corporate design.

Especially at the beginning it is confusing for many PowerPoint users that several slides are displayed on the master level. After all, the design of all slides and layouts should be consistent, whereas PowerPoint allows you to develop different designs for different slides and layouts. This means that in addition to the rules of the master slide, rules can be created for slides with the same content alignment. Typical distinctions made by PowerPoint are title slides, image slides and text slides.

For most presentations it is perfectly sufficient to create the master slide and a maximum of three to four layouts. A big advantage is that the remaining layout slides and placeholders do not have to be deleted. PowerPoint is able to detect and ignore unused elements.