ABOUT THIS CONTENT
TechRepublic has a collection of articles offering the best of their PowerPoint tips and tricks. Here is a basic tutorial for adding your corporate logo to all of your slides.Recently, one of my colleagues was designing a presentation and ran into a stumbling block: She couldn’t remember how to add the company logo to every slide in the presentation. Fortunately, I was able to quickly point her in the right direction with a handy tip for everyone who designs slide presentations.
Anyone can master this tip
As all of you experienced PowerPoint users know, you can make a change that affects all the slides in your presentation by editing the Master Slide. To do so, open PowerPoint’s View menu, select Master, and then choose Slide Master. When you do, you’ll see a screen like the one below.
Next, place the logo file on the master slide. It will appear in the same position on all the slides. If your Picture toolbar is displayed, start by clicking Insert Picture From File (the first button on the left). If your Picture toolbar isn’t open, just go to PowerPoint’s Insert menu, choose Picture, and then select From File.
When the Insert Picture dialog box opens, navigate to your company logo file (as we did below) and click Insert.
PowerPoint treats the logo image as just another object. Simply click on the image’s border and drag it to the appropriate location on the Master Slide. (If you need to change the size of the image, do that now by clicking on one of the corners and shrinking or expanding its borders.) The first figure below shows what our Master Slide looks like after we moved the logo to the bottom-right corner. The second figure below illustrates how this change to the Master Slide affects the slides in our presentation.
What can go wrong
Here are a couple of things to keep in mind when you’re adding your logo to the Master Slide.
- Make sure the image doesn’t obscure other elements on the slide. For example, as you can see in Figure C above, our logo covered up portions of two footer text boxes—areas you can use to number your slides or include the same text at the bottom of each slide. In this case, covering those areas didn’t matter because my colleague wasn’t planning to use those areas in her slide presentation.
- Your users may also get unexpected results when they first insert the company logo image file. For example, the image may come in so big it covers the entire slide. In that case, you must select the object that contains the logo and carefully adjust its size. If the image contains too much white space, you may need to edit the image in your favorite graphics editor before you add it to your Master Slide. However, with the Picture toolbar, you can click the Crop tool and use it to tighten up the image in place.
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