Recently, a professor called the Training Team because the formatting on many of the slides in his PowerPoint presentation was not consistent with the formatting he had set on the Slide Master. After visiting his office and looking at his presentation, I realized what was causing the problem.
In PowerPoint, the Slide Master is the template for your presentation. If you make a change to the Slide Master, it will change for your entire presentation. However, if you have already applied formatting to one of your individual slides, it will not follow the guidelines of the Slide Master. He had changed the layout and formatting on some of his individual slides, and then made changes to the Slide Master, thinking that the changes would be applied to the slides that he had edited individually.
Individually editing each element on each slide to match the slide master formatting would be horribly tedious, so I started looking for a better way to reapply the Slide Master formatting. After a fruitless Google Search, where many people acknowledged the problem, but didn’t have solutions, I went to http://office.microsoft.com. This really should have been my first stop, because within a minute or two of my arrival at the Microsoft Office site, I found the answer.
Office 2003
1. In normal view, bring up the Slide Layout task pane (if it isn’t already up) by going to Format > Slide Layout.
2. Select the slide to which you want to reapply the master layout.
3. In the Slide Layout task pane, find the layout type that you want to reapply.
4. Click the arrow on that layout and then click Reapply Layout.
To reapply the Slide Master formatting to several slides at once (assuming they have the same layout), you can select multiple slides and following the same steps.
Office 2007
1. Select the slide or slides you would like to reapply the Slide Master formatting to.
2. On the Home tab of the ribbon, in the Slides section, click the Reset button.
8 responses so far
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1 Sarah Dooley // Dec 3, 2008 at 6:25 pm
Ooh this is very helpful! I have struggled with this many times.
2 Holly Green // Dec 5, 2008 at 4:25 pm
I’m glad it will be useful for you! I know it’s really frustrating to have to format every slide individually.
3 Rick Landau // Mar 27, 2009 at 3:37 pm
Thank you, thank you for this. The PPT 2007 Help was not at all helpful in this regard. I believe I read every word in the help that came up w.r.t. apply, reapply, master slide, and other similar searches, and none of them mentioned that the word “reapply” was now spelled r-e-s-e-t.
4 lorraine tilbury // Apr 16, 2009 at 8:27 am
Thank you SO much for this! i had the same problem as Rick L. Even the allegedly helpful ‘ppt ribbon mapping workbook’ that’s supposed to explain where all the 2003 commands are in the 2007 version was Most unhelpful. I was getting so frustrated that my usual shortcuts would no longer work!! thanks again
5 Chris Brodie // May 29, 2009 at 10:08 am
This was incredibly helpful! Have you figured out how to do this on a Mac with Office 2008?
Thanks!
6 Holly Green // May 29, 2009 at 1:06 pm
I’m really happy that several people have found this post helpful!
Chris, I don’t have a Mac, so I can’t test this, but try following the Applying a Slide Master instructions toward the bottom of this page - http://www.uwec.edu/HELP/PPoint07/master-m.htm.
I hope it’s the answer, and would enjoy hearing back from you about whether it works.
7 Chris Brodie // Jun 2, 2009 at 8:43 am
Hi Holly -
This is so frustrating, because I have been a capable PowerPoint user in the Windows environment. I’ve been using a Mac for only a year now, and I love it, but PPT has been a challenge. There are times when I’ve made changes to the master that are not showing up on the slides. It seems to be an issue of whether the changed item is part of the header/footer, but I’m not sure that is consistent. Thank you again for your support and interest.
8 Holly Green // Jun 17, 2009 at 3:24 pm
Chris - You might try the Mactopia (Office for Mac) forums. Here’s a link to the one about PowerPoint - http://www.officeformac.com/ProductForums/PowerPoint/.
I hope you find your answer, and am sorry I wasn’t able to be more helpful.
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