Change Slide Layout in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows

Each PowerPoint presentation contains several slides. Let’s compare each slide to a blank canvas or an empty sheet of paper! You can thereafter add content to the slides in much the same way as you use brushes to create strokes of paint, or a pen to write. For example, do you want some text? Then you must add a text box. Want a picture? Just insert a picture and place it anywhere on your slide! Wait, this is not really the proper way to work in PowerPoint!

Unlike a new canvas or a blank sheet of paper, PowerPoint does not like to provide you so unstructured freedom, and this can be good in many ways. Primarily, PowerPoint structures each slide you create into one of its prescribed layouts. Examples of such layouts include:

• Title layout (comprising 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 other layouts

Newer versions of PowerPoint, including PowerPoint 2016 also let you create your own Slide Layouts. In this tutorial, you will learn how you can change the layout of any selected slide from one to the other in PowerPoint 2016:

1. Launch PowerPoint and open any existing presentation, or just use the blank, new presentation which is created as soon as you launch PowerPoint. Such a blank presentation already includes one slide, as shown in Figure 1.
2. 
   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 Slides Pane to bring up a contextual menu as shown in Figure 2. Within this menu, choose the Layout option. This action will bring up a sub-menu (refer to Figure 2 again), and as you can see, the selected slide in this instance uses the Title Slide layout because its thumbnail has a grey background (highlighted in red within Figure 2).
3. 
   Figure 2: Ascertain the layout of your active slide

Nine or More Slide Layouts?

As you can see in Figure 2, there are nine default slide layouts available. But you could be seeing a few more slide layouts if you are using a custom template or theme, or if you have installed additional language packs for East Asian text or complex scripts.
3. To change the layout of the active slide to another type, click on another thumbnail that represents a different layout in the same sub-menu that is shown in Figure 2.
4. Alternatively, select the slide whose layout you want to change and access the Home tab on the Ribbon. Click the Layout button to bring up the Slide Layout drop-down gallery, as shown in Figure 3. Note that the Slide Layout drop-down gallery provides the same options as shown in the sub-menu shown within Figure 2. Thereafter, click any of the other Slide Layouts available. In Figure 3, you can see the Blank Slide Layout being selected.
5. 
   Figure 3: Slide Layouts drop-down gallery
4. This will change the Layout of the selected slide. In Figure 4, you can see that the Title Slide Layout has been changed to Blank. Compare with Figure 1, shown earlier on this page.
5. 
   Figure 4: Slide with a changed Slide Layout