Don't be intimidated by the presentation designs included with PowerPoint. These designs are only a starting point. Feel free to adapt, combine, customize, and tweak to your heart's content. If you come up with a presentation that really gets your point across, save the presentation as a template and use it to design new presentations.
A design is a set of four mastersa Title Master, Slide Master, Notes Master, and Handout Masteralong with a group of color settings called Standard color schemes. Between them, the four masters completely control the look and feel of a presentation: background design, color, and pictures; fonts, sizes, and attributes; bullet points; and location and contents of placeholders. In other words, it includes practically everything except the content itself. The color schemes make it easy to change groups of color settings.
Note
PowerPoint's dialog boxes and Help files use a variety of design-related terms to describe variations on templates. A design template (sometimes referred to as a presentation design) typically includes only design elements (that is, four masters and the color scheme), with no other slides. A content template (also known as a presentation template) contains a group of slides with title text and bullets.
