Master slides are how professional decks stay consistent without heroics: change the master once in MasterView and every slide inherits the change. RixSlides exposes the full hierarchy — masters, the layouts beneath them, and the slides built on those layouts — alongside the organizational tools that keep a long deck manageable: thumbnails, sections, slide transfer and duplication. This page covers the once-not-thirty-times workflow.
The hierarchy: master, layouts, slides
Three layers, each answering a different question:
| Layer | Answers | Typical content |
|---|---|---|
| Master | What does every slide share? | Fonts, color scheme, logo, footer, slide number field |
| Layout | Where do things sit on this kind of slide? | Placeholder positions for title, body, images |
| Slide | What is the content? | Your actual words, pictures, charts |
A 60-slide deck might use one master, six layouts and sixty slides. When the footer moves, it moves once — on the master.
Edit the master in MasterView
- Open MasterView from the view menu.
- The master and its layouts appear as editable canvases.
- Change shared elements: reposition the logo, restyle the footer, adjust the title font, place a slide number or datetime field.
- Select each layout to tune its placeholder arrangement — the title layout centers things, the content layout stacks them, the section divider shouts.
- Close MasterView. Every slide using those layouts updates instantly.
Byte fidelity applies here too: masters and layouts from an imported .pptx open as they were, and your edits write back as native master parts PowerPoint reads unchanged.
What belongs on the master vs the slide
- On the master or layout: anything that must be identical everywhere — branding, footers, fields, decorative rules.
- On the slide: anything unique — the content itself.
- The classic mistake is pasting a logo onto individual slides. Fix that by putting the logo on the master once and deleting the thirty slide-level copies.
Organize the deck: thumbnails, sections, transfer
MasterView handles consistency; the thumbnail rail handles order:
- Thumbnails render every slide at a glance. Drag to reorder, click to jump.
- Sections group slides into named chapters — "Context," "Findings," "Ask." Collapse a section to focus on another, and drag whole sections to restructure a long deck in seconds.
- Slide duplication clones a slide for variations — a second chart slide with the same framing.
- Slide transfer moves slides between decks, carrying their layout references; the paste options let you keep source formatting or adopt the destination's theme.
For merging two decks' content, transfer plus paste options is the path; for updating deck-wide design, the master is. Knowing which problem is which saves the most time in deck maintenance.
The format brush and masters, working together
Two tools cover most of the remaining cleanup:
- The format brush copies styling between slide-level elements when a change is too small for a layout tweak.
- A saved style template packages the whole master system for reuse, so the next deck starts consistent rather than becoming consistent.
What to explore next
- Templates and styles to save your master system for reuse.
- Text and shapes editing for slide-level work beneath the master.
- Images and background removal for deck-wide imagery on layouts.