Confused by master slide, layout, schemes, themes and objects

I’m using OnlyOffice 9.5.0 on Nextcloud 29.0.8 via a shared hosting service. I’m trying to create a presentation with a slide master and some objects with the right font and colours.

I went into “Slide Master” mode and put my logo on the slide master, and edited the objects there to have the right font and colour for the title textbox, and the main content textbox. This seems to be the wrong way of doing it. When I add a new slide, I thought it would have the layout as it appears on the slide master, but it doesn’t have any layout.

Choosing the “TItle, Content” layout only creates one title textbox, and it doesn’t have the specified font or colour.

What is the correct process? Thanks.

Hello @adam42

Brief description of the Slide Master is available here:
https://helpcenter.onlyoffice.com/ONLYOFFICE-Editors/ONLYOFFICE-Presentation-Editor/UsageInstructions/SlideMaster.aspx

In Slide Master mode you can edit existing layouts to automatically apply them to all slides in your presentation or create new ones instead of configuring them manually for each slide. After making necessary changes to Master Slides you can close this mode and continue working with presentation.

Thanks for replying. So does the master slide itself play any role in the layout apart from acting as “parent” to the layouts, i.e. are the objects placed on the master slide functional or irrelevant?

It is more like a layout builder that allows creating and editing layouts to facilitate process of presentation making - instead of configuring each slide separately you can simply build/edit a layout with needed elements, they will be applied to every slide in normal mode that has configured layout.

OK. Is there any point in placing objects like text boxes on the master slide itself? It seems to have no effect when I choose a new slide. Excuse my ignorance but I haven’t found any step by step instruction to guide the way I should construct the master slide and the layouts.

Say I was starting from zero, and I want to create a layout in my master slide that includes a title text box with the specific font I want and the specific font size, alignment etc. That’s what I need to know.

You need to enter Slide Master mode via View tab, then in that mode go to Home tab and start configuring:

  1. To create new layout press Add layout, it will add a new default layout template that you can rearrange or build from scratch by selecting all elements with CTRL+A and deleting them;
  2. To add a title box check box Title in Insert tab, it will add a default box that inherits all properties across all layouts;
  3. To add a text box select Content type in the Insert Placeholder dropdown, you can start configuring this box to your needs as this one is not bound to any other content box on other layouts. Via Home tab you can set all text properties for the box.

Once done, you can get back to normal mode and select this new layout.

Please note that the list of layouts corresponds to the order in Slide Master. You can remove unnecessary layouts if needed to make the list less confusing by selecting unwanted layouts and deleting them.

I hope this would help.