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