Master slides in PowerPoint provide a very effective mechanism for all of your slides to have a similar look and feel. Now imaging if you could extend the concept to have several different master slides in your presentation?
No, I am not suggesting that you change the look and feel or branding every few slides or so. I am suggesting that you use a “mini” master slide to allow for several slides to have the same basic content, which can then be tweaked per slide.
So for example, imaging that you your presentation has 10 slides containing a map of South Africa, each of which highlights a FIFA 2010 world cup football venue.
South Africa FIFA Map 2010
Now, the traditional approach would be to have everything on a single slide and to use a lot of fancy animation to make each venue highlight in turn, or to create a single slide and make 9 more copies. Both approaches have problems.
The first is messy and complex, the second requires duplication of work, especially if you wish to change the background image.
So, how about creating mini master slide with the image on it, then you just need to the the customisation on the other slides. Make sense? I think it will be pretty cool.
I will add it to my wishlist.
Image from http://wikitravel.org/upload/shared/e/ee/Map-South_Africa-fifa-2010.png
Related posts:
- PowerPoint Presentations – a wishlist for 2009 I was recently asked by a fellow public speaking blogger, Olivia Mitchell from Speaking about Presenting what I would like...
- PowerPoint Karaoke slides On Monday evening, I ran a PowerPoint Karaoke contest at the Cape Communicators Toastmaster Club. This is the first one...
- How NOT to use PowerPoint Barack Obama?s "Yes We Can" speech injustice in PowerPoint This is a mock-up of a slide deck from Barack Obama...
- Barak Obama’s slides – how they could have looked In my last post, I spoke about the very poor slides from a recent presentation by by Barack Obama. –...
- Coke shows us how not to create slides This is a presentation pulled off the Coca Cola (Japan) website. The slides are of their "Financial Results Presentation for the...
[...] here: PowerPoint wishlist – “mini master slides” | Craigstrachan.com … Tags: a-similar-look, a-very-effective, for-assemblies, imaging-if-you, into-their, [...]
Hi Craig, it’s a handy idea, and one I frequently use. I don’t find it any quicker than simply duplicating slides (well, I do, but not enough to write home about) but where it scores is in reducing the size of the file if I need to transfer it (mind you, with memory so cheap these days that’s becoming less and less of an issue).
For me, the bid advantage of this idea lies in the way it keeps my files ‘clean’ and reduces the amount of ‘guff’ I have floating around around in a file.
S