One of the hallmarks of a good presentation is consistency in look and feel. To achieve that consistency, you can use themes and color schemes built right into PowerPoint (see Chapter 7 for more about these). But there may be other elements you want to use consistently from slide to slide, such as a company logo, and it can be cumbersome to have to add these again and again, slide after slide.
That’s where masters come in. Masters allow you to add a graphic, modify the text formatting or slide layout, or add a global footer. Then, whatever you have added in the master will appear on every slide.
Masters are flexible, as well. If you want one section of your presentation to use a master element or two, but in another section you want to introduce a change, you can use more than one master in your presentation to do so.
There are three masters you can work with in PowerPoint: Slide master, Handout master, and Notes master. Note that any changes you make on individual slides override the settings on masters.
Slide masters start out with a set of slide layouts defined by the currently applied theme template. That theme determines the font treatment, placement and size of placeholders, background graphics, animation, and color scheme. You can make changes to any of the layouts in a slide master, so that any time you apply one of those layouts to a slide, whatever is on that layout will appear automatically. You can use the Edit Master tools on the Slide Master tab to add a master set or add a new layout to an existing master set. Use Edit Theme tools on the Slide Master tab to change formatting for the text on your slides.
