Introduction

As you develop your presentation, an important element needs to be considered : the look of your slides. The design of your presentation is just as important as the information that it contains. A poorly designed presentation, without the eye-catching design elements will lose your audience, and then what your presentation has to say won't really matter.

Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003 has professionally designed templates available to you. To make your presentation consistent, masters are available. Masters are templates that contain all of the properties of your PowerPoint presentation ”background color, text font style and color , date and time, and graphic placement, are all examples of properties that will be placed on each of your slides. Using the Title and Slide Masters, you can set up your presentation to have the dynamic details that will make your slide show a success.

Besides the text and graphics that you place on your slides, another important part of a presentation is the use of color. Color schemes are used throughout your PowerPoint slides ”the background, text, graphics, shapes , and shadows. All of the colors need to work together. Not everyone has an eye for color, and pulling it all together can be daunting. PowerPoint uses eight preset colors that are included in color schemes to help you design your presentation faster. You can add other custom colors to your scheme using hues, saturation, and luminosity.

Once you've set up your masters to be exactly the way you want them, you can save it as a new master. Company specific styles, graphics such as logos, colors schemes and other elements, can now become a new template to be used with other presentations in the future.