Change Slide Layout in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows

A typical PowerPoint presentation comprises a bunch of slides and we 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),
• 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

We already looked how you can create your own slide layouts.

Follow these steps to change the layout of any selected slide from one to the other in PowerPoint 2010 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 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, below. Within this menu, choose the Layout option. This action will bring up a sub menu. Again refer to Figure 2. As you can see, the selected slide in this instance uses the Title Slide layout because its thumbnail has a highlighted background, as shown in Figure 2.
3. 
   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 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 a 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 Layout gallery is also accessible from the Home tab of the Ribbon

Nine or More Slide Layouts?

As you can see in Figure 3, 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.
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