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 2007 comes with professionally designed templates to help you create a consistent presentation look. A template is a presentation file that consists of one or more slide masters. A slide master is the part of a template that contains all of the properties of your PowerPoint presentationslide layouts, themes, effects, animation, backgrounds, text font style and color, date and time, and graphic placement. Each slide master contains one or more slide layouts, which defines the positioning and formatting of content on a slide. Layouts contain placeholders, which hold and format future text and other slide content, such as slide numbers, date, time, and headers and footers.

Besides the text and graphics that you place on your slides, another important part of a presentation is the use of color. Not everyone has an eye for color, and pulling it all together can be daunting, so PowerPoint provides you with professionally designed color themes, which you can apply to any slide master. A theme is a set of unified design elements that provides a consistent look for a presentation by using color themes, fonts, and effects, such as shadows, shading, and animations.

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