Slide masters and adding slide transitions

Hello students, welcome to Kwickprep. Your presentation has thirty slides, and you must add the school logo to every one. Will you paste it thirty times? No. Today we will learn the slide master, which does it once, and slide transitions, which add effects between slides.

Let us start with the master. A slide master is a main design slide that controls the look of other slides. It holds the background, the fonts, the colours and items like a logo. When you change the master once, every slide that uses it changes too. In Impress, this is called a master slide, and one presentation can have more than one.

Let us compare. Without a master, you must edit every slide one by one. With a master, you edit once and the change reaches all slides. Without a master, slides may end up with different fonts and colours. With a master, all slides match. So a master saves a lot of time.

Here are the steps to edit the master. Open the View menu and choose Master Slide. The master opens in the workspace, so change the background, fonts or colours of the title and text areas. Insert a logo picture, or set a footer like the school name. Click Close Master View on the toolbar, or choose View, then Normal. Every slide using that master now shows the changes.

What should you put on a master slide? A background colour or picture for all slides. The font style, size and colour for titles and body text. A logo or a light watermark that should appear everywhere. And fields like the date, a footer and the slide number, which Impress fills in automatically.

Pause and predict. You insert the school logo on the master slide. Your presentation has twelve slides using that master. How many slides now show the logo? All twelve, because every slide follows its master.

Now, transitions. A slide transition is the visual effect you see when one slide changes to the next during a slide show. Some examples are Fade, Wipe, Push and Cover. In Impress, you set it in the Slide Transition panel of the sidebar, also found in the Slide menu. You see the full effect only when the slide show runs.

Here are the steps. Select the slide in the slides pane, or select several slides. Open the Slide Transition panel in the sidebar. Click an effect, and a preview plays. Set the duration in seconds, and a sound if you want one. Choose whether the next slide comes on a mouse click or automatically after some seconds. Click Apply Transition to All Slides if every slide should use it.

The panel gives four main options. Variant changes the direction of the effect, for example from left or from top. Duration is the number of seconds the change takes. Sound plays a sound during the change, but use it rarely. Advance slide decides whether the next slide comes on a mouse click or automatically after a set time.

Students often mix up animation and transition, and exams ask this. An animation moves one object, while a transition affects the whole slide. An animation happens inside a slide, while a transition happens between two slides. An animation is set in the Animation panel, while a transition is set in the Slide Transition panel.

A few tips keep your presentation professional. Use one transition style for the whole show, so it feels consistent. Keep the duration short, around one second. Avoid loud transition sounds, because they distract the audience. And set up the master before you add many slides, so they all follow it from the start.

Let us revise. A master slide controls the look of all slides that use it. Edit it from View, Master Slide, and then close Master View. A transition is the effect between two slides. Its options are variant, duration, sound and how to advance. Remember, animation is for objects and transition is for whole slides.