Change Slide Layout in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac

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 a 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 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 more layouts

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

Follow these steps to change the layout of a slide in PowerPoint 2011 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 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, locate the Slides group within the Home tab of the Ribbon, and click the Layout button in this group, as shown highlighted in orange 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 background, as shown in Figure 2.
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 Blank layout, as shown highlighted in orange within Figure 3, below.
4. 
   Figure 3: Blank Layout to be selected in Layout 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 layout changed from Title Slide to Blank