creating a master slide with an image placeholder

Hi Mary,

I'm not 100% clear on what the problem is, so I'll just give an overview of what to do.

Under the "View" menu, choose "Show Master Slides".

As an example, let's copy the "Blank" master. Click on "Blank" and choose "Duplicate" from the "Edit" menu.

You now have "Blank copy" as your new master slide. Click on the "Slide Inspector" tab in the Inspector, then the "Appearance" heading. Check the "Object Placeholder" box and a placeholder appears on your slide. Resize the box until it is the way you want it. If you want a title and/or body text, you'll have to add those as well and size as you like.

OK, now we have your master set up. Choose "Hide Master Slides" under the "View" menu.

Add a new slide. The default master for that slide with be text and bullets, most likely. So with the slide selected in the slide viewer on the left, go to the "Masters" drop down menu and choose the new master you created. The placeholder and any other options you chose will appear.

Now, drag a picture into the placeholder. It will resize so that its height or width conform to the boundaries of the box. It won't fix the box exactly unless its original size is the same ratio as the box's ratio. For portrait-sized images it will fit the vertical space of the box, and landscape-sized images will fit the horizontal space of the box.

Please let me know if you have questions.

Hi George

I am a Powerpoint user and have just transitioned to using Keynotes.

My problem is that while the "Master Slides" in Power Points allow one to freeze backgrounds/ footers/ dates etc on the whole presentation - how does one do this in the Keynotes?

The masters in keynotes appear to be templates which can be picked up for usage.

The way you explained Mary's problem I get the impression that I would have to create a duplicate master for most of the templates in Keynote if I want to retain the same look and feel all across my presentation. This appears much more work - besides not being sure if all the elements (footers/ objects etc) are sized equally in all the templates created on duplication.

I am sure I have got something wrong. Please help.

Dear Deepak,

I'm not a PowerPoint expert so I can't explain things to you in PowerPoint terms. In Keynote, there are themes that are made up of master slides. Master slides act as templates for commonly-used slide formats--an opening title slide, a slide with a title and bullets, etc.--that cover most of the needs for the average slideshow.

Let's say that you are making a slideshow using the "Leather Book" theme. Let's also say that for the "title and bullets" slides in your presentation, you don't want Baskerville for your bulleted text, you want Futura. So under "View" you would choose "Show Master Slides" and you would select the "Title and Bullets" slide. Then you would select the bulleted text and change the font.

Now, hide the master slides and add a slide after the title slide. By default it will be a "title and bullets" slide. If not, just choose the "title and bullets" master from the drop down menu and it will be applied to the slide. When you add bulleted text to the slide, it will be in your new font, Futura.

And, if you have some title and bullet slides in this presentation that were made before the change to the master slide, you can just right-click the slide in the slide chooser and choose "reapply master to slide." It will format the bullets as Futura.

The thing to note here is that you have only changed the "title and bullets" master FOR THIS PRESENTATION. If you were to start a new presentation using the "Leather Book" theme, the font for "title and bullets" would be Baskerville. If you want to use your newly formatted master slides in future presentations, you should save them in a new theme.

All you have to do is make the changes to the master slides that you like and then choose "Save Theme as..." from the File menu. You'll give your new, personalized theme a new name and it will be available for you to use in the future.

Things like footers etc can be easily duplicated across masters. Just put the items you want on one master--say a logo, a footer and some sort of horizontal rule--and select them all. Copy them and then move to the next master you want to format. Paste and everything will be pasted in position.

Changing the color of a slide is a little slower as you have to do it on each master one at a time, but you can add custom colors to the color picker on the bottom and that makes things a little faster.

Let me know if all this makes sense and if you have further, specific questions.