The PowerPoint User Interface can make managing slide masters and layouts tricky and time-consuming because you can’t easily see which slides are using which layouts. Slidewise presents slide masters, layouts, and slides in a single view, allowing for quick and easy organisation.
The Slide Masters tab in Slidewise, provides a number of tools and information that make the job of managing slide masters and layouts more convenient.
Slide masters are divided into "Active" and "Unused". Slide masters become unused when none of their layouts in use. PowerPoint would normally remove any unused slide masters, but if they have been set to "Preserved", like the one below, this prevents them being deleted.
Remove unused slide masters
To remove an unused slide master just right-click on the master name, or heading and select "Delete Unused Master".
Consolidate slide masters
The Consolidate Masters feature is useful for merging redundant masters, a common issue when copying and pasting between presentations, which often results in many similar masters. It can also be used to apply new templates to old presentations.
Right-click on the "Active Slide Masters" heading, or any master name and select "Consolidate Masters" to open the consolidation dialog.
To reassign slides between masters, select the masters you want to reassign "from", and the master you want to reassign "to". Then, click the "Reassign slides" button. Slidewise will automatically match slides from the "from" masters to the equivalent layouts in the "to" master.
If any layouts are missing from the master you are reassigning to Slidewise will tell you which layouts are missing up-front and give you a detailed report on the planned changes. You can then choose to skip affected slides, or add the missing layouts so everything can still be reassigned automatically.
Any slide masters containing only unused layouts will be deleted unless they are preserved, in which case you can use the Delete unused masters feature on the Inactive Slide Masters node.
Reassign slides to new layouts
If you prefer to take more control of the process of reassigning slides between layouts, you can still do this much more quickly using Slidewise. The "Reassign Slides" feature allows you to easily select one or more layouts and change them to use another slide layout. You can change to a layout that exists in your current slide master or even one from another slide master.
Expand a master name in the tree to see which layouts are in use. Expanding a layout will show you which slides use that layout.
To move slides to a different layout, right-click on a layout and select "Reassign Slides".
Then choose where to reassign the slides to and click the "Reassign slides" button.
Rename Masters/Layouts
To rename masters and layouts using Slidewise, right-click on the name you want to change and select “Rename Master” or “Rename Layout”.
Delete unused layouts
If you have a lot of unused layouts in your slide master(s). Right-click on any Unused layout to remove them from your presentation. Be cautious here though - it's not recommended to delete the 11 default layouts that PowerPoint creates for you initially.
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