TO CREATE custom layouts for your various levels of slides, on the View tab, in the Presentation Views group, click Slide Master. In the Overview pane on the left, you will see the built-in layouts to apply to your slides. Add any custom layouts here that you want, and as always, the best place to begin is with the most important slides in the presentation.
Creating the Key Point slide layout Manually
To create a custom split-screen layout to apply to your Key Point slides, follow these steps:
1. In the Overview pane, right-click the large Office Theme Slide Master slide. When you select any Slide Master in the Overview pane, all of its editable elements appear in the large view of the Slide Master in the slide pane. The Slide Master determines the formatting of any new Slide Masters and custom layouts you will create. Adjust the font type, size, and color if you want to apply those changes to all slides going forward, but do not delete anything from this particular Slide Master. When you finish, in the Overview pane, right-click the Slide Master and select Preserve Master.
2. In the Overview pane, position the cursor directly below the Slide Master slide, and then right-click and choose Insert Layout.
3. Right-click the custom layout you created, choose Rename Layout, and in the Rename Layout dialog box, type Key Point and then click Rename.
4. In the slide pane, right-click the large view of the Slide Master and select Grid And Guides, and in the Grid And Guides dialog box, under Guide Settings, select the Display Drawing Guides On Screen check box, and then click OK.
This gives you temporary guides to help align objects on a slide; remove them by following the same steps and clearing the check box. See PowerPoint Help to learn more about how to use temporary guides.
5. On the Slide Master tab, in the Master Layout group, clear the Footers check box, and then click Insert Placeholder, click Picture, and drag a rectangle to fill the entire right half of the slide.
6. Next, on the Insert tab, in the Illustrations group, click Shapes. Click Rectangle, and drag a rectangle to fill the entire left half of the slide.
7. Right-click the rectangle, and specify a fill color—in this example, black.
8. Hold down the Shift key as you select both the rectangle and placeholder, right-click, and then click Send To Back.
9. Select the title area, and drag it down and to the center of the rectangle on the left, using the resizing handles as needed. Change the text in the title area to read Click to edit Key Point headline. If you need to change the contrast of the font color to make it readable against the color you chose for the rectangle, right-click the title area, and change the Font color—in this example, to white, as shown in Figure E-1.
10. On the Slide Master View tab, click Close Master View to return to Normal view.
Tip
To do that, select and rename the Key Points Sketches custom layout to Key Point following the instructions in step 2 of the preceding procedure, and then make your design changes. When you have finished, return to Slide Sorter view, and you’ll see that the layouts of the Key Point slides have been updated automatically according to the design changes you made.
Now that you have designed the Key Point custom layout, select a Key Point slide, and on the Home tab, in the Slides group, click Layout. The Office Theme window now includes the Key Point custom layout you created, as shown in Figure E-2.
FIGURE E-1 Designing a custom layout for the Key Point slides.
FIGURE E-2 Selecting the Key Point custom layout to apply to a slide.
Click the Key Point layout, and the formatting will be automatically applied, as shown in Figure E-3.
FIGURE E-3 A Key Point slide with the Key Point custom layout applied.
There are two ways to insert a photograph in the Picture placeholder on the right half of this slide. The first way is to find a picture and copy it and then click the Picture placeholder—not the Picture icon—and click Paste. The second way is to click the Picture icon in the center of the Picture placeholder to display the Insert Picture dialog box, as shown in Figure E-4. When you find a photo you plan to use, it is good practice to save it in a familiar folder on your computer or network to easily locate it.
FIGURE E-4 Selecting a photograph to insert.
Whichever method of inserting a photo you use, the photo automatically fills the Picture placeholder that you added to the custom layout, filling the right half of the screen. Although the original photo is horizontal, the Picture placeholder has automatically cropped the photo to fill the vertical space. If sizing photos is not your talent, this feature takes care of things for you. To resize or recrop the photo the way you want, select the picture, as shown in Figure E-5, and use the tools on the Picture Tools tab to make adjustments.
FIGURE E-5 A photograph automatically cropped and inserted into the Picture placeholder.
Creating the Explanation slide layout Manually
Next, follow similar steps to create a custom layout that you will apply to all the Explanation slides.Again, using a split-screen layout for all the Explanation slides in this example presentation is only one way to go, but in this case, a similar layout will complement the Key Point slide layout. To create another custom split-screen layout to apply to all your Explanation slides, follow these steps:
1. On the View tab, click Slide Master.
2. In the Overview pane, position the cursor directly below the Key Point layout you created earlier, and then right-click it and choose Insert Layout.
3. Right-click the custom layout you created, choose Rename Layout, and in the Rename Layout dialog box, type Explanation and then click Rename.
4. On the Slide Master tab, in the Master Layout group, clear the Footers check box. When you click Insert Placeholder to add a placeholder on the right half of the slide, take a look at the range of other types of placeholders to use in the custom layout. On the Key Point custom layout shown earlier, the sketches indicated there would always be a photo on the Key Point slides, so selecting a Picture placeholder was a good fit and provided the added feature of automatically cropping photos to fit the space. But here on the Explanation slides, if you want flexibility beyond just photographs, choose Content, as shown in Figure E-6—this will allow you to insert a range of types of content on the slides where you apply this layout. Alternatively, you don’t have to use a placeholder at all in your custom layout—in that case, later add graphics manually to your slides.
FIGURE E-6 Designing a custom layout for the Explanation slides—the Insert Placeholder drop-down menu shows a range of options.
5. As you did in the Key Point layout, add a rectangle to fill the left side of the slide. Fill this rectangle with a different color that in combination with the layout will call attention to these Explanation slides second, after the Key Point slides. As you did earlier with the Key Point custom layout, select the rectangle and placeholder and send them to the back, drag the headline over the box on the left side, and change the font color if you need to make it more legible. Change the text in the title area to read Click to edit Explanation headline.
