Faster design with the Layout button

Back in the days of the dinosaurs, I spent tons of time on the slide design phase of my PowerPoint presentations. Now, there's nothing wrong with investing in design, but it was taking me too long to design each slide.

I took each slide and made copies of it. After that, I'd apply a slide layout to it. Then I'd compare them and see which one I liked. That took lots of copy and paste. Lots of doing the same work over and over. Lots of time I could have spent doing something productive like playing popular Bing games.

The Layout button makes the process much faster. It's on the Home tab in the Slides group. Now I make my slide with the layout I think will work best, and use the Layout button to quickly look at different layouts. The best part is that I can always go back to the format I used originally by selecting that format. It takes my total slide design time down so that it's measured in minutes instead of hours.

Sometimes I want to compare the original layout to the new layout by viewing both at the same time. In that case, I create a new slide by duplicating the original slide and modify the new one. Often I use the Slide Sorter view to get a good look at both slides at once.

You can apply the same layout to multiple slides by selecting them in the Slides pane and selecting the layout you want from the Layout button. This is particularly useful when setting up Dynamic Content transitions since they work best with slides using the same layout.

-- Colin Suess, for the PowerPoint blog team