Slide Masters

Slide Masters control the layout, font, and backgrounds of all the slides in a PowerPoint. The Slide Master provides the template for each new slide. Instead of making manual changes to slide structure, fonts, and colours on each slide, make the changes to the Slide Masters. This ensures consistency and saves time and effort.

Who benefits from using Slide Masters

First and foremost, as a creator you will benefit from Slide Masters. Slide Masters allow you to set fonts, layouts, and backgrounds once and have them apply to your whole presentation. By ensuring consistency, you enhance accessibility. Slide Masters make it easier to set accessible colours, fonts, and slide reading order.

Learners with dyslexia, ADHD, or visual disabilities may rely on assistive technology to consume PowerPoint content. When the coded order does not match the visual arrangement of slide content, the slide will not be read in the correct sequence to users that rely on assistive technology. Those learners will not have an equitable opportunity to consume and understand learning material.

In the above video example, the reading order does not match the visual composition. This can happen when creating layouts as you go, creating slides without placeholders, or not setting placeholders in the correct sequence in a Slide Master.

How to use Slide Masters

To customize or create Slide Masters, move to the View tab and select Slide Master.

Learn more about what a slide master is from Microsoft Support.

Select a preset layout or create a new one. Use the tools to Insert Placeholders (to ensure proper reading order), select colours and background styles (to create accessible contrast), choose fonts (to make reading easy), and determine what elements such as footers and slide numbers appear on your slides.

Best practice is to change font, colour, and background on the Master Layout. Select the Master Layout and change appearance using the tools in the Background group. This applies those changes to all slides. Customizing Placeholders is best done on individual layouts. Placeholders are used to structure slides by providing preset, correctly ordered locations for content, text, or media and title placeholders that act as navigational waypoints. Learn more about customizing a slide master.

Avoid adding textboxes when creating slides. Best practice is to add placeholders on your slide layouts via the Slide Master. This will reduce or eliminate reading order errors.

Double Check

Randomly adding textboxes and other media to a slide without using Placeholders will result in reading order issues. The PowerPoint Check Accessibility tool will flag such issues with Check reading order. While possible to resolve, a better approach is to use accessible layouts and not creating an issue that needs to be solved.

The Check Accessibility tool will flag other issues caused by Slide Masters such as Hard-to-read text contrast and Missing slide titles. Keep those in mind when creating a Slide Master or choosing a template.

If making one minor singular change to a slide, it is not necessary to make that change on the Slide Master. However, any customization should be double checked to ensure it meets accessibility standards.