Duplicate, Rename, and Edit Slide Layouts in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac

Any slide in a PowerPoint presentation is always based on one of the available Slide Layouts (we call these just Layouts for the rest of this tutorial). You can either choose a layout when you add a new slide, or even change the layout of your existing slides.

Both these options are accessible from the Home tab of the Ribbon. Click the down arrow next to the New Slide button to summon the drop-down gallery you see towards the right in Figure 1 below. If you click any of the layout thumbnails here, you end up adding a new slide based on that layout. Once your slide has been created, you can still change its layout by clicking the Layout button to bring up the drop-down gallery shown towards the left in Figure 1 below. Our sample presentation has 11 layouts but if your presentation has fewer or more layouts, that's perfectly acceptable since the number of Slide Layouts available depends upon the active Theme of your presentation. What's important though is that you will see the same number of layouts in both the New Slide and Layout galleries as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Layout and New Slide galleries

Each of these layouts imparts a different look to your slide(s), and the layout you choose for any particular slide will depend upon the type of slide you are creating or editing. Each layout has a different name mentioned below the thumbnail, as shown in Figure 1, above. Typically, you will use the Title Slide layout for your opening slide, the Title and Content layout for any slide that has a bulleted list or even a chart, a picture, etc. These available layouts seem to cover most types of slides. Still, you may sometimes want to create a new layout based on your individual requirements. As an example for this tutorial, we will create a new slide layout for Quotation slides. Since a Quotation slide is similar to the Title Slide layout, we will use that layout as a base to customize and create a new layout:

1. Launch PowerPoint. By default, PowerPoint opens a blank presentation. Select View | Master | Slide Master menu option as shown in Figure 2.
2. 
   Figure 2: Slide Master option within the View menu
2. This opens the Slide Master View, as shown in Figure 3. In Slide Master view, you'll find that the left pane contains a larger thumbnail on the top, called the Slide Master (highlighted in blue within Figure 3), and several smaller slide thumbnails representing individual Slide Layouts (highlighted in red within Figure 3).
3. 
   Figure 3: Slide Layouts within Slide Master view
3. Now, to create our Quotation slide layout, we will duplicate an existing slide layout. As already discussed, the closest in appearance to our Quotation layout is the Title Slide Layout (highlighted in orange within Figure 4 below). Select the Title Slide Layout and choose the Edit | Duplicate menu option as shown in Figure 4.
4. 
   Figure 4: Duplicate option within Edit menu
5. Select an existing layout and press the Ctrl + D keyboard shortcut to duplicate the selected layout.


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4. This will create a duplicate of the Title Slide Layout, as shown in Figure 5. Select this duplicated layout and right-click or (Ctrl + click) to bring up a context menu. Within this menu, select the Rename Layout option, as shown in Figure 5.
5. 
   Figure 5: Rename Layout option within the context menu
6. Alternatively, with the duplicated slide selected, click the Rename button within the Slide Master tab that you can see highlighted in red within Figure 6.
7. 
   Figure 6: Rename button within the Slide Master tab
Tip: Should you bother renaming a layout? The answer is a resounding yes, because you need a name that describes the reason for a new layout.
5. This brings up the Rename Layout window, as shown in Figure 7.
6. 
   Figure 7: Rename Layout window
7. Within this window, type a name for the new layout. We named it Quotes, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 8. Once done, click the Rename button.
8. 
   Figure 8: Name provided to the duplicated Slide Layout
6. Now, you can edit the placeholders to make it look like a quote layout. You can even resize the placeholders. Also, replace the text within the placeholders to end up with new boilerplate text, as shown in Figure 9 in which you can also see that we have changed the color of the text.
7. 
   Figure 9: Duplicated Slide Layout edited
7. When done, click the Close Master button (highlighted in red within Figure 9 above). This will get you back to Normal View. To ascertain if your new layout is available, access the Layout drop-down gallery. You can see that the new layout has now been added within this gallery, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 10 (compare with Layout drop-down gallery shown towards left within Figure 1, shown earlier on this page).
8. 
   Figure 10: Quotes Layout within the Layout gallery
8. You can now use your new layout to add Quote slides. Save your presentation often.