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 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 2016 for Mac, 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 2016 for Mac:

Open any existing presentation, or launch PowerPoint and create a new blank presentation. Such a blank presentation includes one slide, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Blank presentation with one slide
Each slide within a presentation has a slide layout applied to it. 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 (see Figure 2). This will bring up the Layout gallery that you can see 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).

Figure 2: Title Slide layout highlighted in Layout gallery
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 (see Figure 3 below).

Figure 3: Section Header Layout to be selected in Layout Gallery
This will change the Layout of the selected slide. As you can see in Figure 4, the Title Slide Layout has been changed to Section Header Layout.

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.