The Master Slide is the template upon which all slides are created. It sets the appearance of all of the various layouts in a given slide deck such as font and background. By editing Master Slides, your changes are propagated to all slides that share the same layout. There are a number of clever things you can do when you learn how to use and edit the Master Slide feature. This post provides some use-cases and a tutorial video to show you how to make these changes.
Quickly Change Font Color or Style
Sometimes users want to customize a Theme by changing the font style, size and or color. Making these changes one slide at a time is tedious. By editing the Master Slide template, these changes can be done quickly and easily and pushed through the entire deck.
Create Custom Layouts & Backgrounds
Custom backgrounds can be created by using the native shapes tools or upload and add images in Slides. When doing so in the Slides Master, your changes become fixed to the background, and immovable for other editors. In the Master, you can create custom layouts, for example, a graphic organizer that won’t allow students to move the circles when they are trying to add words.
Create a new layout for a vocabulary assignment where students add their word, definition, image and example sentence to boxes on a slide. Using the Shapes tool, from inside the Slides Master, add boxes and change the background color. Be sure to change the order so that the box you added is behind any text. To do this, choose “Arrange” –> “Order” –> “Send to Back”. Students will be able edit the slides with their own text but won’t be able to move any of the background elements.
Adding Instructions
Make use of the space around the slide by adding instructions which will remain in place for students when assigning Slides projects. Upload an image and text to the right or left sidebar to make use of this space for instructions. See example below:
