A PowerPoint Slide Master contains objects that appear on each slide within the presentation. One only has to create an item once on the Master Slide for PowerPoint to automatically include that item on every slide. For instance, if you want the all titles and headings to be Arial font at 44 pt. with a shadow effect, then you will only need to make this change once in the Master. The remaining slides within the presentation will take on this change so that you will not need to go to each slide to change the font style and size.

The Slide Master has placeholders already set up for the text. The format of these objects determines the way your text will look on each slide. Slides can be made to look different from the Slide Master. However, a Slide Master will offer you a consistent starting point.

The Slide Master is very flexible and allows users to customize slides to suit their needs. Things that can be altered in Master slides are:

• Moving objects around such as text placeholders, footers/headers, page numbers, dates, and graphic elements (for background purposes).
• Adding draw objects and images, headings, and other types of text placeholders.
• Changing background colors or design templates
• Altering the format of fonts and bullets.
• Adding custom animation to text.