How to make a powerpoint design template

By submitting your email, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. PowerPoint provides extremely useful resources called templates that automatically construct the foundation and framework of your presentation. Next, you need to choose the slide orientation and size. A small drop-down menu will appear. Here, you can 1 adjust the slide height and width or simply select a predefined option from the drop-down menu, and 2 select the slide orientation.

This allows you to maintain consistency throughout the template, as well as eliminating the need to make changes to each individual slide. The Slide Master will appear in the left pane. The Slide Master is the top thumbnail that appears in the pane. Each sub-thumbnail represents each slide layout available in your theme.

Edits you make to the Slide Master will affect each slide layout. This is where the magic happens. First, you can select a unique theme for what will be your PowerPoint template. A drop-down menu will appear, presenting a large library of themes to choose from.

Each theme comes with its own fonts and effects. Browse through the collection and select the one you like. You can also choose a background style for the theme you chose. To save the PowerPoint presentation. Your template will now be saved and is ready to be used. Use Google Fonts in Word. Use FaceTime on Android Signal vs.

Customize the Taskbar in Windows What Is svchost. Best Smartwatches. Drag and drop a placeholder to a slide. Select a template font. Save your template. Did this summary help you? Yes No. Log in Social login does not work in incognito and private browsers. Please log in with your username or email to continue. No account yet? Create an account. Edit this Article. We use cookies to make wikiHow great. By using our site, you agree to our cookie policy. Cookie Settings. Learn why people trust wikiHow.

Download Article Explore this Article Steps. Tips and Warnings. Related Articles. Article Summary. Double-click the PowerPoint app icon, which resembles a white "P" on an orange background. This will open the PowerPoint home page. On Mac, simply opening PowerPoint might open a new presentation depending on your settings. If it does, skip this step.

It's in the editing ribbon above your PowerPoint with File and Home. This will set the overall look of the PowerPoint. This tab is in the editing ribbon at the top of the PowerPoint window. Clicking it opens a toolbar below. On Mac, this option is on the top menu bar. Go to source. You'll find this option near the left side of the toolbar in the "Master Views" section.

Doing so will open the Slide Master tab on the left side of the PowerPoint window. On Mac, first click Master , then click Slide Master. Click one of the slide templates in the left-hand column of options. There will be one slide for each type of slide that you can use e. Once you select a slide, you can pick a theme from the "Themes" drop-down that's located above the slide master panel.

You can also apply backgrounds by clicking Background styles. You can also click Format Background It's on the left side of the Slide Master tab and will give you options that you can add to your slides for later use. A drop-down menu will appear with the following options: Content - Inserts a written content outline. Unless you have a specific reason to do otherwise, I recommend that you choose Bottom for your vertical text alignment. That way your title text will always stay perfectly aligned at the bottom, from slide to slide.

This helps avoid jumping titles for any slides that have more than one line of text. On the flip side, if you plan on having short titles for all your slides no more than one line , I recommend using the Middle text alignment instead. Regardless of what you decide, make sure you test different title lengths to see what will work best for your PowerPoint template. Adjusting your guides like this will make aligning objects on your slides much easier as your Smart Guides will automatically snap them together.

That will turn them on. Alternatively, you can go up to the View tab in the Ribbon and select Guides inside the Show area. The Text placeholder on your Parent Slide is special in that it will dictate the default formatting of all the other content placeholders in your presentation except for the Title placeholder and the Footer placeholders. Setting the default here on the Parent Slide is important because it makes it a lot easier to make fast and consistent changes to swathes of content down the road.

Later in this template series, I will show you how to format away from this default behavior on the Child Slides. But first you want to set its default formatting. To do that:. In this step, you need to align the horizontal and the vertical guides to that they align with the Text placeholder. The next step is to change the font size of the different levels of text inside the placeholder. Next, you have to adjust the indent of the bulleted lists so that it appears in all your slide layouts.

You can adjust the bullets as per your personal preference. Based on your knowledge of how someone is going to be using this template, you might decide to add more or less space as required.

You can see their book on templates here. This inevitably happens with templates and you want to be prepared for it! In the Size section, verify that the height of the placeholders is the same.

Remember to also add new guides around these placeholders to help keep them in place. Note: For the slide number placeholder, you can also add symbols as I have here such as a bar and two spaces , in order to create a visual break from the other placeholders.

The next thing is to format the date and time footer placeholder. You can choose any kind of formatting you like. The final default placeholder to format on the Parent Slide here is the footer text placeholder. This way, it is next to the logo and the text inserted will extend out towards the right.

While all the default placeholders have now been set up and formatted correctly, there is still one element that you can add on the Parent Slide of your Slide Master; and that is a logo. You can also use this same technique to add a watermark to your PowerPoint slides. To see the different ways to do this, read our guide here. The Child Slides represent the blueprints for each type of slide included in your template.

By default, your Child Slide layouts will inherit your Parent Slide formatting, but as you will see, you can tweak these layouts to meet your individual needs. The key to designing good Child Slide layouts is to keep in mind how the end-user is likely going to insert content on each type of slide.

You want to make it easy for everyone to quickly fill them in when using your template. The first step is to edit the Title slide layout. This layout is designed to be filled in with the title and general information about your presentation. Typically, its looks slightly different than the rest of the layouts.

The first thing we need to do when formatting our Title slide layout is to think about the background. Typically, a Title slide will have a slightly different background from the regular Content slides. However, because the background has been set on the Parent Slide, this means that you will have to deviate from it. The first method for hiding anything on the background graphics such as the logo, background patterns, design elements, etc.

To do that, with the rectangle still selected, go to the Shape Format tab on the Ribbon, click on the Send Backward dropdown and select Send to Back. This includes and background images or patterns, logos, and other design elements.

You can easily make them visible again by unchecking the Hide Background Graphics checkbox. While the background image can be different, we want to keep the theme consistent across all our slides. First, navigate back to the Parent Slide and select the pattern image without the gradient. Note: Pasting an object directly into your slide background like this means that it can no longer be edited in your PowerPoint template.

If instead you paste it onto the slide as an image, you can always go back in and make adjustments to the image, and therefore the background too. The next step is to add in a design element that matches the general theme and style of the template. To do that, right-click the rectangle, open the Send Backward dropdown and select Send to Back. First, adjust your Title and Subtitle placeholders.

To do that, simply select the two placeholders and:. Because if someone decides to use them despite your instructions, you still want them to appear correctly and match the rest of the template. There, you can turn them on. So unless you truly want someone to NEVER be able to add a page number, date and time, and footer text to the Title layout, then I recommend leaving them on the Child Slide, in order to keep that option open.

If you deselect the Footers checkbox in the Slide Master View as we did above, then when someone tries to insert footers in the Normal View, they will not appear. One more thing you might notice is that the guides are not visible on the Title slide. Unfortunately, the guides you set on the Parent Slide will likely not match the content you have on the Title slide and any Child Slide whose content deviates from it. The next step is to edit the most commonly used PowerPoint slide in any presentation, the Title and Content layout.

However, in this example, we are going to add one more design element to the layout, which is a straight line. To do that simply:. That means that the Parent Slide has to be relatively bare-bones. You can always add extra elements in the Child Slides. From here onward, you will need to format each of the Child Slides to match the content that goes in it. You will want to follow the same procedure as in Step 2 above, keeping in mind what each Child Slide is designed for and how the content should be placed.

Some layouts will require more custom formatting and design elements. For example, for the Divider slide the first slide in the examples below, I have added a rectangle that matches the design elements on the Title slide layout. In addition to the default Child Slides that PowerPoint gives you, you have the option to create your own. If you make the slide under 10 times, it may not be worth clogging up your Slide Master area. But if you use it frequently, creating a layout template for that type of slide will save you countless hours.

Keep in mind that the blank layout and other blank variations can always be used to create more one-off slides. Creating a Custom Agenda Slide.

Note: You can change the shape of a placeholder, along with all other properties of a typical shape. That means that you can also add fill, outline, effects, etc.

Note: You can perform these steps for all custom Child Slides. You can also create custom layouts for a lot of slides such as sport slides, case studies, contact us, etc. There are also other slides in the template such as the content slide with subtitles, a blank slide with a title.

You can format them per your requirements. They are not very different from one another, however, the only different ones are the title slide and the divider slide. The first thing is to set the animations and transitions for your slides. For all placeholders that you want to automatically animate in your template, simply select it and apply your animation. These masters determine the look and feel of your PowerPoint handouts when you print them.

To learn how to format these elements in regards to printing multiple slides per page in PowerPoint, read our guide here. It is highly recommended that you test your template before you distribute it. That way you catch any errors before your users do.

You now have the foundational skills to start creating your own PowerPoint templates and use them to build beautiful and tailor-made PowerPoint presentations in the future. If you want to learn more about building and deploying your template in professional settings, I recommend checking out my step-by-step training course, see details here. You'll also get our newsletter with the best PPT tips on the web, which you can unsubscribe from with one click.

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Part 1. Creating your PowerPoint template slide backgrounds. Use the different paste special options. Add a pattern background to your slide. Crop images to fit your entire slide background.

Add a radial gradient fill to a shape with transparency. Add new guides and move them around on your Slide Master. And more! Set the colors for your PowerPoint template.