A PowerPoint placeholder is a blank container on a slide that you can use to hold text, graphics, or other content. They are pre-formatted and enable you to edit the slides in a presentation file consistently and easily.
They come in handy when you need to create a consistent look and feel for your presentation. Placeholders make it easy to add, customize, and arrange content on the slides. Keep reading to learn more about the Placeholders in PowerPoint.
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PowerPoint Placeholders: How They Work
Whenever you open a new or existing PowerPoint presentation, you’ll see different types of placeholders on the slides. Such as the title page will look like this:
The page contains a large placeholder for the title of the presentation and a smaller one next to it for the subtitle.
In the following pages, you will find placeholders for the page title, bulleted texts, charts, SmartArt, images, and videos.
You can add content to these placeholders by clicking on them and entering the desired information. The content you enter will appear in a consistent format throughout your presentation.
It helps to know how a placeholder differs from an ordinary text box. A text box is something you draw yourself anywhere on a slide, and its size, font, and position are entirely up to you. A placeholder, on the other hand, is built into the slide layout, so it already knows where text should sit and how it should be styled. That is why typing into a placeholder gives you matching headings and body text from one slide to the next without any extra effort.
Because placeholders are tied to the layout, they are also the key to editing many slides at once. If you open the Slide Master view and adjust a placeholder there, every slide that uses that layout picks up the change. So if you decide halfway through a deck that your titles should be larger or a different color, you can fix it in one spot rather than touching each slide by hand.
How to Customize PowerPoint Placeholders
If you want to change the way a placeholder looks, you can do so by right-clicking on it and selecting Format Shape.
In the Format Shape pane, you’ll find options to change the fill color, line color, and effects of the selected placeholder.
You can resize a placeholder by simply dragging the circles in its corners.
You can also add different types of placeholders by clicking the arrow beside New Slide and then selecting the desired layout from the given choices. For example, if you want to add a placeholder for an image, you can select the “Picture with Caption” placeholder.
How to Delete a Placeholder in PowerPoint
If you want to delete a placeholder, you can do so by right-clicking on its border and selecting the “Cut” option. This will delete the selected placeholder along with its content.
Note: You can also delete placeholders by selecting them and pressing the “Delete” key on your keyboard. You can also use keyboard shortcuts (CTRL+X) to delete placeholders.
Conclusion
PowerPoint placeholders are a great way to ensure a consistent look and feel for your presentations. They come in handy to add and arrange content on the slides. We hope this post has helped you learn about PowerPoint placeholders and how to use them. Thanks for reading!