Learn about Slide Layouts in PowerPoint 2003 for Windows.
Author: Geetesh Bajaj
Product/Version: PowerPoint 2003 for Windows
OS: Microsoft Windows XP and higher
Create a new presentation in PowerPoint 2003, and you will see that the first slide has two text placeholders, as shown in Figure 1, below.
Figure 1: New presentations start with an opening slide
The topmost placeholder is for the slide title and the bottom placeholder is meant to accommodate the subtitle. PowerPoint calls this slide layout Title Slide.
Before you actually type in any content into these placeholders, you will see that they sport the convenient "Click to…" messages. When you actually click and type, this boilerplate text is replaced with your own text, as shown in Figure 2 (compare with Figure 1).
Figure 2: Replace the boilerplate text with your own content
Now when you add another new slide (keyboard shortcut, Ctrl+M), you don't see a slide similar to your opening slide. Rather than slide title and subtitle placeholders, this new slide has slide title and text placeholders, as shown in Figure 3, below.
Figure 3: A different type of slide
Do you want more keyboard shortcuts?
Explore our PowerPoint Keyboard Shortcuts and Sequences Ebook that is updated for all PowerPoint versions.
This text placeholder can hold much more content than a subtitle placeholder. Also, when you type some text and press the Enter key, you will find that your cursor moves to the next line sporting a new bullet (see Figure 4, below). PowerPoint calls this slide layout Title and Text.
Figure 4: Your text shows up as a bulleted list
When you add another new slide, it will again use the same Title and Text slide layout as your second slide. But PowerPoint actually possesses many more Slide Layouts that you can use for your slides. To see all available layouts, choose the Format | Slide Layout option, as shown in Figure 5, below.
Figure 5: Explore more Slide Layouts
This will bring up the Slide Layout task pane (highlighted in red within Figure 6). Notice that there are many slide layouts available within this pane.
Figure 6: Slide Layout task pane
See Also:
Slide Master and Slide Layouts: Slide Layouts in PowerPoint (Index Page)
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