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A typical PowerPoint presentation comprises a bunch of slides and I like to think of these slides as akin to a blank canvas -- you add your content to the slides in much the same way as you use brushes to create strokes of paint to color a canvas. However unlike canvas, PowerPoint does not like to provide you a non-structured freedom -- and this can be good in many ways. Primarily, PowerPoint categorizes each slide type into one of its prescribed layouts -- examples of such layouts include:

• Title layout (comprising of placeholders to add a title and subtitle for a slide),
• Title and Content layout (comprising a slide title and a multi-purpose content placeholder),
• Title Only layout (comprising a slide title placeholder with a blank area),
• Blank layout (comprising no placeholders at all).
• And several more layouts

In PowerPoint 2010 (as in PowerPoint 2007), you can also create your own slide layouts -- but that is something we will discuss some other time. In this tutorial, you will learn how you can change the layout of any selected slide from one to the other.

Follow these steps to change the layout of a slide in PowerPoint 2010:

1. Launch PowerPoint and open any existing presentation, or just use the blank presentation which is created as soon as you launch PowerPoint -- such a blank presentation already includes one slide, as shown in Figure 1.
   
   
   Figure 1: Blank presentation with one slide
   
   
2. Each slide within a presentation has a slide layout applied to it -- to ascertain which layout your active slide uses, right-click the thumbnail representing it within the Slide/Outline pane to bring up a contextual menu as shown in Figure 2. Within this menu, choose the Layout option -- this will bring up a sub menu. Again refer to Figure 2, and as you can see the selected slide in this instance uses the Title Slide layout (because its thumbnail has a yellow highlighted area).
   
   
   Figure 2: Layout
   
   
3. To change the layout of the active slide to another type, click on another thumbnail that represents a different layout in the same submenu that is shown in Figure 2.
   
   Alternatively, select the slide whose layout you want to change and access the Home tab on the Ribbon. Within the Slide group click the down arrow on the right of the Layout button to summon the Slide Layout gallery (see Figure 3 -- this provides the same options as shown in Figure 2). Thereafter, click any of the other slide layouts available.
   
   
   Figure 3: Slide Layout gallery is also accessible from the Home tab of the Ribbon
   
   
4. This will change the Layout of the selected slide (Title Slide Layout has been changed to Blank Slide Layout), as shown in Figure 4.
   
   
   Figure 4: Slide with a changed slide Layout
   

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