In PowerPoint 2013, the
Slide Master influences the layout and look of
all slides in your presentation. One of the changes you can make to your Slide Master is applying the Background Style so that all
slide layouts and actual slides in your presentation use a different slide background. In this tutorial, we will explore how you can
choose from any of the 12 available
Background Styles to apply to the Slide Master.
Note: You can also have more than one Slide Master in your presentation, and any of those multiple Slide Masters
can influence the actual slides following that master in your presentation.
Follow these steps to learn more:
- Launch PowerPoint 2013. You will see
the Presentation Gallery here. Select
the Blank Presentation option to open a blank presentation with a new slide. Typically the blank presentation has
Office Theme applied. If your presentation is using another Theme, apply the Office Theme since
this is a basic and clean Theme that lends itself best to changes and edits that we discuss later in this tutorial. If you do not
know how to apply a Theme, explore our Applying Themes in
PowerPoint, Word, and Excel 2013 tutorial.
Figure 1: Blank presentation with Office Theme applied- Now, access the View tab of
the Ribbon and click the Slide Master
button, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 2.
Figure 2: Slide Master button- This opens the Slide Master View,
as shown in Figure 3. Here, within the left pane you'll find one large slide thumbnail that represents the Slide
Master which has been selected within Figure 3, and the several smaller slide thumbnails below represent
individual Slide Layouts. For now, do
understand that changes made to the Slide Master influence its Slide Layouts, and in turn, this influences all slides within your
presentation that are following that Slide Master.
Figure 3: Slide Master View
Note: In hierarchy terms, Slide Layouts are dependent for their appearance on the Slide Master although you can
individually override these dependencies.
- Now, make sure that the Slide Master is in selected status as shown in Figure 3,
above and click the Background Styles button (highlighted in blue
within Figure 3).
- This brings up the Background Styles drop-down gallery with 12 default slide background styles
shown highlighted in red within Figure 4. Click on the style of your choice to apply it
to the Slide Master. In Figure 4, you can see the Style 11 being selected. Also, you can see a
Live Preview of the Background Style being selected on
the active slide.
Figure 4: Background Styles drop-down gallery
Note: These 12 default styles change when you apply a different
Theme to your presentation. Also, do you see
the
Format Background and
Reset Slide Background options (highlighted
in
blue within
Figure 4) below the Background Style thumbnails? These options are
explained in our
Custom Backgrounds in the
Slide Master in PowerPoint 2013 tutorial. The
Reset Slide Background option is meant for individual Slide
Layouts. It is used to reset the slide background to it original status, on a particular slide layout.
- This will apply the selected background style to the Slide Master and all the Slide Layouts belonging to the
selected Slide Master as well, as shown in Figure 5 (compare with Figure 3, shown earlier on this
page).
Figure 5: Background Style changed within the Slide Master view- Click the Close Master View button on the Slide Master tab of
the Ribbon (highlighted in red within Figure 5, above). This will get
you back to Normal view, where you can see the new
Background Style applied to all your slides.
- Save your presentation often.
