You’re close to finishing a resource for your classroom, or for TPT, and then you decide you want to rearrange/move elements, add/change the clip art, or change the font.
That may not be a huge deal if your pages are all designed differently, have no repeated elements, or there aren’t many pages; but if you’re creating task cards or multiple pages with the same elements over and over on all the slides, making those changes can be a pain!ย
Slide Masters Can Help!
All those little changes can be made more quickly and easily if you create your resources using slide masters (in PPT or in Google Slides). Slide masters make some parts of resource creation a bit faster – using them can definitely save you time! Before we look more closely at how they work, check out a few benefits of using the slide masters:
- If you decide to change an element youโve used repeatedly (like its size, position, color, font), you only have to change it onceย โ on the master.
- If you forgot to add something on every slide (like room # or copyright info), you only have to add it once โ on the master.
- If you want to remove something you had on every slide – remove it from the master and it’s gone from every slide that used that master.
- If you ever have trouble with accidentally moving an element when youโre trying to edit another one, slide masters help with that too! Anything thatโs on the master canโt be moved or changed on the individual slides โ so itโs easy to add other page elements on top of โmaster elementsโ and not worry about misplacing those elements or having to move them to the back, etc.
What Exactly Are Slide Masters?ย
According to the PPT description, โSlide Masters control the look of your entire presentation, including colors, fonts, backgrounds, effects, and just about everything else. You can insert a shape or a logo on a slide master, for example, and it will show up on all your slides automatically.โ
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โSo, slide masters are basically a way to control the elements on your slides.
โTake this page of Fall Footloose task card that I made back in 2013(!) I created this using my process at that time: set up the first page the way I thought I wanted each page to be – set the distance between cards, distance between top and bottom, size of cards, card numbers, etc, and then duplicate that page and add my text to each card.
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However, when I was ‘done,’ I decided I should put some little clip art in the left corner of each card. And then I had to place them. And then copy and paste them on all the slides.ย
If you’d like to see a demo for how to use the slide masters, check out the Creating Resources video in the Free Resource Center. You can also download a PDF from the Free Resource Center. Both the video and the guide take you step-by-step through the basics of using slide masters.