Duplicate, Rename, and Edit Slide Layouts in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows

All slides within PowerPoint are based on one of the available Slide Layouts (we call these just layouts for the rest of this tutorial). These layouts can be choosen when you add a new slide or you can even change the layout of your existing slides. Both these options are accessible from the Home tab of the Ribbon.

Click the down-arrow within the New Slide button to get a drop-down gallery as you can see towards the left in Figure 1, below. Click any of the layout thumbnails here, and you end up adding a new slide based on that layout.

Once your slide has been created, you can still change its layout by clicking the Layout button to bring up the gallery shown towards the right in Figure 1, below. Our sample presentation has 9 layouts but if your presentation has fewer or more layouts, that's perfectly acceptable since the number of Slide Layouts available depends upon the active Theme of your presentation. What's important though is that you will see the same number of layouts in both the New Slide and Layout galleries.

Figure 1: New Slide and Layout drop-down galleries

Each of these layouts offers a different look for your slide, and the layout you choose for any particular slide will depend upon the type of slide you are creating or editing. Each layout has a different name mentioned below the thumbnail, as shown in Figure 1, above. Typically, you will use the Title Slide layout for your opening slide, the Title and Content layout for any slide that has a bulleted list or even a chart, a picture, etc. While these available layouts seem to cover most types of slides, you may sometimes want to create a new layout based on your individual requirements. As an example for this tutorial, we will create a new slide layout for Quotation slides. Since a Quotation slide needs to look similar to a Title Slide, we will use the Title Slide layout, we will use that layout as a base to customize and create a new layout in PowerPoint 2016:

1. Launch PowerPoint. You will see the  Presentation Gallery. Here, select the Blank Presentation to open a blank presentation with a new slide. Access the View tab of the Ribbon and click the Slide Master button, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 2.
2. 
   Figure 2: Slide Master button within the View tab of the Ribbon
2. This opens the Slide Master View, as shown in Figure 3. In Slide Master view, you'll see that the left pane contains two distinctly different elements: a larger thumbnail representing the Slide Master (highlighted in blue within Figure 3) and several smaller slide thumbnails below representing individual Slide Layouts (highlighted in green within Figure 3).
3. 
   Figure 3: Slide Master and Slide Layouts within PowerPoint
3. Now, to create our Quotation slide layout, we will duplicate an existing slide layout. The closest in appearance to our Quotation layout is the Title Slide Layout. The orange highlight around the layout thumbnail indicates that it has been selected, as shown in Figure 3, above. Select the Title Slide Layout thumbnail and right-click to bring up a context menu, as shown in Figure 4. From this context menu, select the Duplicate Layout option.
4. 
   Figure 4: Duplicate Layout option
5. Select an existing layout and press the Ctrl + D keyboard shortcut to duplicate the selected layout.


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4. This will create a duplicate of the Title Slide Layout, as shown in Figure 5. Select the duplicated layout and right-click to bring up a context menu. Within this menu, select the Rename Layout option, as shown in Figure 5.
5. 
   Figure 5: Rename Layout option
Tip: Should you bother renaming a layout? The answer is a resounding yes because you need a name that describes the reason for a new layout.
5. This brings up the Rename Layout window, as shown in Figure 6. Within this window, provide a name for the new layout. We named it Quotes, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 6. Once done, click the Rename button.
6. 
   Figure 6: Rename Layout window
6. Now, you can edit the placeholders to make it look like a quote layout. You can resize the placeholders. Also, replace the text within the placeholders to end up with new boilerplate text, as shown in Figure 7, below.
7. 
   Figure 7: Layout edited
7. When done, click the Close Master View button within the Slide Master tab of the Ribbon (to locate the the Close Master View button, refer to Figure 3 shown earlier on this page). This will get you back to Normal View. To ascertain if your new layout is available, access the Layout drop-down gallery and note that the new layout has now been added within this gallery, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 8.
8. 
   Figure 8: Quotes Layout within Layout drop-down gallery
8. You can now use your new layout to add quote slides. Similarly you can create more layouts. We show another example in our Creating Picture Layouts tutorial.
9. Save your presentation often.