Video: Edit headers and footers on the slide master

For formatting issues related to the look, size, or position of headers and footers, edit the slide master.

Change the footer

1. Click VIEW > Normal, and click the slide you want to change. To select more than one slide, click the first slide you want to change, then press and hold Ctrl while you click the other slides.

2. Click INSERT > Header & Footer.

3. Click the Slide tab, make the changes you want, and click either Apply to apply the changes to the selected slides, or Apply to All to make the changes to all the slides.

   If you don’t want the footer to appear in the title slide, check the Don't show on title slide box.

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I have applied headers and footers to this presentation, and there are a couple of things that I want to change.

I’ll zoom in for a closer look.

On the title slide, the date appears, but it is broken into two lines; I want it to sit on one line.

My other concern is with the text footer for the rest of the slides: the light green font color is hard to see.

I’ll zoom back out.

For formatting issues like these, related to the look, size, or position of headers and footers, edit the slide master.

To open the slide master, click VIEW, Slide Master.

The slide master is the top slide thumbnail. Make changes to it that you want to apply to all the slides.

You can also make changes to specific layouts, any of these slides below the slide master.

One of our formatting issues is with the date on the title slide. I have selected the title slide master layout.

I’ll zoom in a little.

With the date format I chose, the placeholder is too small.

This is what the date looks like on the title slide. See, how it runs onto a second line?

You can’t see that in the slide master view on this layout. We just see the default date format, which does fit.

In any case, we need to enlarge the date placeholder.

I’ll select it, point to a corner sizing handle, click the two-headed arrow cursor, and drag down to lengthen the placeholder.

The longer date format should now fit on one line. We’ll check that in a minute.

To change the color for the text footer, I’ll click the slide master.

This change needs to apply to all the relevant layouts.

The footers that appear on the slide master are the text footer and date.

(The date shows on the slide master, even though I have chosen not to show it on the slides.)

First, let’s press Ctrl and click to select both footer placeholders.

Then, we’ll click HOME, Font Color, and change the font color to dark blue.

And let’s click Bold to turn off the bold formatting.

Also, let’s center the footer placeholder. To do so, select it: Under DRAWING TOOLS, click FORMAT, and click Align Objects.

Make sure Align to Slide is selected, and click Align Center.

To center the text inside the placeholder, I’ll leave the box selected, click HOME, and click Center.

Let’s click Normal to see the effect of these changes on the slides.

The text footer is now centered and is blue instead of green.

On the title slide, the date fits on one line. But, the text footer, the web address, looks like it slid down.

This is because I centered the text within the footer placeholder on the slide master.

That centered the text everywhere, including on the title slide.

When I select the placeholder, think of it in a horizontal orientation, and you can see the text is centered.

Let’s go back to the slide master: VIEW, Slide Master, to fix the title slide.

The title slide master layout is selected.

This layout gives me a way to correct the problem. I’ll select the footer placeholder on the layout.

And I’ll click HOME, Align Left to move the footer text back up (think of Align Left as if this box were horizontal).

This change will apply only to this layout.

I’ll click Normal to switch back to that view. The text footer is now correctly placed on the title slide.

By using the various options in the Header and Footer dialog box, and going to the slide master to make formatting and layout changes, I have the headers and footers exactly as I want them.

For more information, see the course summary and experiment on your own.