Corporate templates frequently have text featured on all the slides such as this highlighted copyright and confidentiality statement. In PowerPoint 2003, this text was typically inserted into a footer placeholder within the Slide Master. This approach would universally add the text to all of the slides, and it would be unalterable in the normal slide view. As my company transitioned over to PowerPoint 2007, we noticed a distinct difference in how the new version of PowerPoint handled these text placeholders. In PowerPoint 2007, the footers were now alterable (i.e., you could edit the text and re-position the entire placeholder), and they seemed to be disconnected from what was in the Slide Master. We simply needed to update the copyright year from “2007” to “2008”, but we found this simple task to be very difficult to achieve.

Changing the year in the Slide Master had no effect on the existing layouts, existing slides, or even new slides that were created. In addition, slides inserted from older presentations would retain their older copyright year. The only way to change the text was to alter it on each individual slide. Not fun and not the solution I was hoping for. What was the solution? Text boxes can be distinguished from footers by the dash style.

Text boxes have dashes while footers are dots when they are selected. The key to fixing this problem is to use text boxes and not footers in the Slide Master. If you avoid using the default footer placeholder and use a text box instead, you will be able to create unalterable text on all of your slides.

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Like magic, all of the layouts and new slides will leverage the specified text in the Slide Master. I’m not sure why Microsoft changed the treatment of its footer placeholders in PowerPoint 2007. I imagine the change has impacted and will continue to impact more than just our corporate template.

Learn from our painful experience and beware of the footers! My biggest beef with footers is not the master/child relationship (which I’ll admit can be confusing so thanks for the tip – Lisa). It’s with the fact that the footers are not embedded in the slide.

When I move things around, I hate accidentally grabbing the footer. The footer should not be editable on individual slides — only at the Slide Master view. The footer then becomes out of alignment with the placement on the other slides.

Very annoying. That’s why I recommend the text box over the footer. Thanks for your post! I have exactly the same problem using the Mac version of PPT 2008, but more so. I would like to use one of the solutions describe here, but I can’t find either the “Master master” slide or any way to insert a page number into a text box.

The “but more so” comment is because I find I can’t *ever* get rid of a placeholder once it’s been used. I want to use a different footer but even deleting it from the slide or notes master won’t make it go away. Any ideas about how to get rid of these and/or how I can get a page number into a text box would be appreciated. How do you change the formatting on endnotes in word for mac pdf. What was MS thinking???

PPT-nin; Congrats on your new Mac. I expect you’ll love it! I have fathomed answers to one of the problems I was having and ‘think’ I have an answer to another. Thought I’d be a good citizen and share here for any Mac users in the meantime. The easiest one – I found out how to get a ‘page number’ on a slide.

Mainly the problem was me thinking of this as a ‘page’ number. What MS calls this is the ‘Slide number’. Due to this I probably just overlooked the easy solution in my haste. Adding this is accomplished through the Insert menu’s “Slide Number” option.

The part I think I have right, is that what I take to be the Master Master slide is shown by choosing View -> Master -> Slide Master. A set of proto-slides is shown in a panel on the left. The top side is slightly larger. This is what I guess to be the “Master Master”. The problem I have with this is that making a change on this slide (such as adding a footer) is not passed ‘down’ automatically to all the other more specific masters. I have had to click on each one and use Insert -> Master Placeholders Footer on each and every one of the Master styles.

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