Working with Slide Master in PowerPoint

The Slide Master allows you to design a template with appropriate styles which will be used in all generated slides. The following items can be set in the Slide Master, and Financial Package will respect them during report generation.

• Font color and size

• Bullet styles – such as circle or square

• Background style – such as image or color

• Theme – packaged set of formats including background style, bullet styles, and font colors and sizes

• Slide Orientation – portrait or landscape

• Slide Layouts – different slide types used depending on whether you are displaying content, images, or titles/section headers

The Slide Layouts that are created in a Slide Master in PowerPoint have a particular “signature”. This signature is a Microsoft identifier that can’t be modified and is used by the Financial Package to determine an appropriate template to generate the Financial Package. Therefore, you must use a Microsoft Slide Master that has not been modified as the baseline for creating your PowerPoint template. More specifically the Slide Layouts mentioned above should not have the following alterations made otherwise it will impact the produced Financial Package report.

• Slide Layout name change

• Removal of Placeholders. Placeholders are items such as text boxes, images, picture, chart, or table. You can modify Placeholders in terms of size and placement on the slide.

The recommended approach to working with a Slide Master is to start with the default PowerPoint Slide Master and then add items. For example a background color or image can be applied to the Slide Master, which means that all Slide Layouts will inherit this color or image. In addition, items such as footers with page numbers and dates can be defined in the Slide Master and applied to all slides. You can control the use of items in the footer by selecting Insert > Header & Footer in PowerPoint. You can control which items you want included in the template. For example you can control whether to include the date, slide number or footer for example. You can format these objects in the footer by selecting View > Slide Master.