Microsoft Office/Creating a Custom Design Template

While PowerPoint offers a nice variety of design templates, it is also useful at times to create your own. A design template, once created, can be used over and over again. For instance, if your department wanted all presentations to include your company's logo in one corner, with its colors as the background, you could create a design template with these features and reuse it again and again.

Master Slides

A master slide is one that is a part of every presentation that controls certain text characteristics such as font type, size, and color, as well as background color and style. Masters can affect all the slides in a presentation. There are masters that control the title slide, notes pages, and handout pages. When you apply a template to a presentation, you apply a new set of masters that control the presentation's look and format. There are four types of masters used in PowerPoint, as described below.

Type of Master	Description
Slide Master	The Slide Master is an element of the design template that stores information about the template, such as font styles, placeholder sizes and locations, background design, and color schemes.
Title Master	The Title Master is used to make changes to slides in your presentation that use a Title Slide layout. This enables you to give a title slide a different look from the rest of your presentation.
Notes Master	The Notes Master is used to set the formatting for your notes pages. You can set headers, footers, and the Notes Body area.
Handout Master	The Handout Master is used to set the formatting of your handouts pages. You can set headers, footers, and the size and positioning of the number of handouts per page.

Slide Background

A slide background is a design element that appears behind the contents of the slide. The slide background is made up gradient, texture, patterns, or a picture. To change the slide background:

1. Select the slide you want to change:
   1. Select a slide in Normal view.
   2. Select the Slide Master.
2. Choose Format/Background.
3. In the Background Fill section, click on the drop-down arrow and choose Fill Effects.
4. On the Fill Effects dialog box, select the tab that contains all the options you want to set and click OK.
5. Click Apply to All.

The following table describes the options you can set in the Fill Effects dialog box.

Tab	Description
Gradient	Enables you to set the color, transparency, shading style, and variants.
Texture	Enables you to select a texture for the background.
Pattern	Enables you to set a pattern, as well as the foreground and background color for the pattern.
Picture	Enables you to select a picture as a fill for the background.

Inserting Graphics

One element you can add to every slide is a graphic of some sort. To add a graphic to one or all slides:

1. Display an individual slide or the Slide Master for all slides.
2. Choose Insert > Picture > From File.
3. Navigate to the folder that contains the picture that you wish to insert.
4. Select the picture file.
5. Click Insert.

PowerPoint allows you to insert most popular graphic formats into your presentation.

Adding Footers

Footers serve many uses in PowerPoint presentations. You can use them to provide information like slide numbers, footer text, and date. All of the information goes at the bottom of each slide in your design template.

Components of a Footer

A footer in PowerPoint is text that you create once, but it appears on the bottom of each slide. It can consist of text, slide numbers, and a date. To add a footer:

1. Display the Slide Master.
2. Choose View > Header and Footer.
3. In the Date and Time section, select the options that you want.
4. Check the Slide Number box to add a number to each slide.
5. Under the checked Footer check box, click in the text box and enter the footer text.
6. Click Apply To All.

Formatting a Footer

You can change the way a footer looks at any time. On the Slide Master, select the placeholder that contains the information you want to change and format the text as you would any normal text. You can also drag the placeholder around if you wish to change its location.

Modify the Slide Master Font

PowerPoint allows you to change the way that the text in each individual part of your presentation looks. If you have a very long presentation, for example, but decide that you no longer like the font for each title, PowerPoint makes it easy to change the font for each title at once. To change the appearance of the Slide Master text:

1. View the Slide Master.
2. Select the text you want to change.
3. Change the font to a different font.
4. Change the font size.
5. Apply a text effect, such as bold.
6. Return to Normal view.

Some Tips for Effective Slide Shows

Here are a few tips that will help your PowerPoint slide shows look professional and promote effective visual clues to help you get your points across:

1. Limit animation.
2. Stay with one slide transition.
3. Use sans-serif fonts.
4. No tiny font sizes; remember the folks in the back row.
5. Keep your slides simple and uncluttered
6. If you are presenting in a light room, use a light slide background.
7. If you are presenting in a dark room, use a dark slide background.
8. Make sure to use high-contrast text and slide backgrounds.