Change Slide Layout in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows

Each PowerPoint presentation contains one or more slides. Until you add content including text to them, these slides appear like 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. But wait, because this is not really the best way to work in PowerPoint!

Often though, audiences expect something structured in your slides. Unlike a new canvas or a blank sheet of paper, PowerPoint is not intended for 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 a 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 other layouts

Newer versions of PowerPoint, let you to create your own Slide Layouts.

Follow these steps to change the layout of any selected slide from one to the other in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows:

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 already 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, right-click it’s thumbnail within the Slides Pane to bring up a contextual menu, as shown in Figure 2, below. Within this menu, choose the Layout option. This action will bring up a sub-menu, 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 background, as shown 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, above, 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, as shown in Figure 2, above.
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, below. 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. Doing so will change the Layout of the selected slide. In Figure 4, below, 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

So, why would you want to change the Slide Layout? That’s because some layouts are more appropriate for the content of your slide. We already explored some examples for choosing slide layouts earlier on this page.