Scenario A: You’ve finished building a PowerPoint deck for the Big Meeting tomorrow, and you get an email from your boss asking you to add one more slide to the beginning of the deck. You create the slide but then notice that all the subsequent slide numbers are off by one. Since you manually added slide numbers to every slide using text boxes, now you have to go through the entire presentation, slide by slide, and update the slide number on each slide individually. What a pain. Scenario B: You were savvy enough to use PowerPoint’s built-in slide number functionality, but despite having checked Slide Numbers in the Header and Footer dialog box, the slide numbers don’t appear anywhere on your slides. What’s happening? Here are the steps to follow to add slide numbers to PowerPoint the right way so they appear where you want them to, and you never have to renumber slides again. Note: Even though you selected Slide Number in Step 5 above, you’ve only indicated that you want the option to add slide numbers to your deck. That’s why the dialog box in Step 5 says “Placeholders.” In this step you have to tell PowerPoint to actually insert slide numbers. Then you can specify where you want the slide numbers to appear and how you want them to look. Note: Remember, suppressing the slide number on the title slide will only work correctly if you’ve chosen the Title Slide layout for that slide. You can double-check this by right-clicking on your title slide, choosing Layout and confirming that the title slide layout is selected. Similarly, if you want the slide number to appear in different positions depending on which slide layout you’ve applied, you can adjust the position of the slide number placeholder on individual layouts within the Slide Master. To do this, navigate to the Slide Master, choose the slide layout you want to modify in the list on the left, and reposition or reformat the slide number placeholder for that specific layout. By now, you have realised that the Slide Master is useful for so much more than just adding slide numbers to your PowerPoint presentation. Just as adding and positioning slide numbers on the slide master affects all slides in the deck, you can use different layouts in the Slide Master to apply different elements and formatting to slides throughout the presentation. If you change one element in a layout master slide, that change will cascade throughout all the dependent slides. Learn more about master slide layouts and become a Slide Master master!
