Change Slide Layout in PowerPoint 2016 for Mac

A PowerPoint presentation comprises a bunch of slides and we like to think of these slides as akin to a blank canvas. You add content to the slides in almost the same way as you use brushes to create strokes of paint to color a canvas. However unlike a canvas, in PowerPoint, you don't have 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),
• Title and Content layout (comprising a slide title and a multi-purpose content placeholder),
• Title Only layout (comprising an entirely blank slide with just one title placeholder),
• Blank layout (comprising an entirely blank slide with no placeholders at all).
• And several more layouts

In PowerPoint, you can also create your own slide layouts, but that is something we will discuss some other time.

Follow these steps to change the layout of a slide in PowerPoint 2016 for Mac:

1. Launch PowerPoint and open any existing presentation. Alternatively, use the blank, new presentation which is created as soon as you launch PowerPoint. Such a blank presentation includes one slide, as shown in Figure 1, below.
2. 
   Figure 1: Blank presentation with one slide
2. Each slide within a presentation is based on a Slide Layout. To ascertain which layout your active slide uses, locate the Slides group within the Home tab of the Ribbon, and click the Layout button in this group, as shown highlighted in blue within Figure 2, below. Doing so will bring up the Layout gallery, as shown in Figure 2, and as you can see, the selected slide in this instance uses the Title Slide layout (because its thumbnail has a highlighted area).
3. 
   Figure 2: Title Slide layout highlighted in Layout gallery
3. To change the layout of the active slide to another type, click on another thumbnail that represents a different layout in the same gallery. We have selected the Section Header layout, as shown highlighted in blue within Figure 3, below.
4. 
   Figure 3: Section Header Layout to be selected in Layout Gallery
4. This action will change the Layout of the selected slide. As you can see in Figure 4, below, the Title Slide Layout has been changed to Section Header Layout.
5. 
   Figure 4: Slide layout changed from Title to Section Header

You can change slide layouts, depending upon which layout works best for your content. Every slide can have a different layout, and typically all layouts are designed to work together to achieve a unified, branded look.