Adjusting Slide Appearance in Microsoft PowerPoint 2013

In this section:

• Understanding what slide layouts and themes control

• Applying a layout

• Working with themes

• Changing theme colors and fonts

• Changing slide backgrounds and sizes

A presentation has to have solid content and clearly fleshed-out topics, but it must also hold your audience’s attention. Visual enhancements such as color, font styles, and graphics go a long way toward impressing your audience through your professional approach.

For Microsoft PowerPoint 2013, you now have several built-in design elements that you can use for your presentations. These design elements, including slide layouts, themes, theme colors, and theme fonts, offer an inherent consistency that comes as a result of a common look and feel. This consistency means that you don’t have to be a graphic designer to prepare an attractive presentation.

Layouts control how many and what types of placeholders appear on a slide. For example, a layout might contain only a slide title placeholder, or a slide title plus content placeholders. Themes can be applied to individual slides or to multiple slides in your presentation. A theme includes background colors, graphics, font styles and sizes, and alignment of placeholders and text. Theme colors are preset combinations of colors for your slide backgrounds, text, and graphic elements, whereas theme fonts are preset heading and body font combinations. You can further customize the look of a presentation by changing slide backgrounds and slide size.

Understanding what slide layouts and themes control

Slide layouts provide a basic structure to your slides by including placeholders that can contain title or subtitle text, bulleted lists, or different kinds of graphic elements (referred to as content) in a variety of combinations. By selecting the right slide layout, you make the job of adding text and content easier because placeholders make building slides automatic.

Whereas slide layouts control the types of slide content, slide themes apply the design elements of a slide. These include a background color, fonts and colors used for various items in the presentation, and effects such as gradients. In addition, each of the built-in themes includes color variants that you can use to change the background color and the colors for other objects such as text.