A Master Slide is a template that is used for the other slides in the
presentation. You can set fonts, colours, textboxes, bullets, and footers.
Once the Master Slide is set up, each time you insert a new slide, it
will have the same formatting as your Maser Slide. That way, you don't
have to keep formatting every slide.
So open PowerPoint and, if you have PowerPoint 2000, you'll see a dialogue
box appear. (For PowerPoint 2003 users, select Blank Presentation from
the Task Pane on the right hand side. If you can't see a Task Pane,
Click
View > Toolbars > Task Pane.)
Here's the image for PowerPoint 2000:
(If you already have PowerPoint open, click
File > New. From
the dialogue box that appears, choose "Blank presentation")
And here's the image for PowerPoint 2003:
When you click on "Blank presentation" in PowerPoint 2000,
you'll see another dialogue box appear. This one:
Select the first one, then click OK.
PowerPoint 2003 users don't have to do anything. When you click
Blank
presentation, you'll see all the slide templates on the right hand
side in the Task Pane. The slide you need is already displayed, but
it looks like the one selected in the image above.
But all PowerPoint users should now see a white screen that looks like
this:
To set up a Master Slide, click
View from the PowerPoint menu
bar at the top. From the View menu, select
Master > Slide Master:
When you click
Slide Master, you'll go in to a different screen.
It should look like this:
The idea is that you can edit any of these areas. When you save your
work, you'll be saving a Master Slide that can be used again and again.
The first thing we can do is add a background, instead of the plain
white one. So, from the PowerPoint menu, click
Format. From the
Format menu, select
Background:
You can also right click on a plain white area (the background) to
see a context menu. Again, select background.
When you click Background, you'll see the following dialogue box appear:
Click the arrow on the dropdown list to see the following options:
Click on
Fill Effects. A new dialogue box appears. This one:
The Gradient tab is not the one we want. But it is quite a useful.
Play around with the various option here, to see what they do. When
you've finished experimenting, click the Picture tab at the end:
Click the
Select Picture button. A standard windows dialogue
box will appear. Use the
Look in dropdown list, and navigate
to
the image files you downloaded. There
should be a folder called Backgrounds. Choose the one called
BlueGradient.jpg.
The dialogue box will then look like this:
Click the
Insert button to get back to the Picture tab, which
should now show you a preview of the background:
Click
OK on the Fill Effects dialogue box, and you'll be back
to the smaller Background dialogue box:
Click
Apply on this dialogue box to see your new background
appear on the Master Slide:
Now that we have a background, we can format the Master Slide.