Every PowerPoint presentation contains a Master slide. This is the slide that holds that formatted placeholder for titles, body text, and background items that appear throughout the presentation. For example, if you wanted your company logo to appear on every slide in the presentation, you would place it in the Master slide. (To view the Master slide, select Master > Slide Master from the View menu.)

While Master slides are infinitely useful, there may be times when you want to suppress an item (or all of them) from the Master slide. Consider the following example.

This is the Master slide:

While this Master slide works well for all slides that contain text or small graphics, consider what would happen if you were to place a complicated drawing on top of this background. The background would compete with the slide content. So, what to do? Simply keep the existing Master slide and suppress the background for the slides that contain complicated graphics.

These are two slides in the same presentation. The first uses the Master slide, and the second suppresses the background graphic.

This text slide works well with the background graphic.

This graphic slide is clean and clear — without the background graphic.

PowerPoint allows you to suppress the following items contained in the Master slide.

• Background
• Background elements (graphics)
• Text styles and placement

To suppress all Master slide background items in PowerPoint

1. Open a PowerPoint presentation.



2. Navigate to the desired slide or create a new one.



3. Select Background from the Format menu.



4. Select Omit background graphics from master.



5. Click Apply.

To suppress the Master slide background in PowerPoint

1. Open a PowerPoint presentation.



2. Navigate to the desired slide or create a new one.



3. Select Background from the Format menu.



4. Click the down arrow and then select an option. Make any changes that you desire.



5. Click Apply.

To suppress the Master slide text in PowerPoint

1. Open a PowerPoint presentation.



2. Navigate to the desired slide or create a new one.



3. Make the changes you want to the format of the title and text. Only the text on the specific slide is affected.