Applying a fill directly to titles in slide masters

[Mary]

I'm using PPT 2003 on Windows XP. The company I work for has a series of
templates where the slide title sits on top of a large black-filled
rectangle. On the slide master, the default Title Area for Autolayouts has
font set to white. Underlying this is a slightly wider black-filled
rectangle. I think this template may be based on an old MS PPT template
where the default is to have no fill on the title box. However, when typing
into the textbox in earlier versions of PPT, you could only see the text if
you were in B&W view. So in the most recent version of these templates, we
use a black fill on the title area. This seems to make the background box
redundant or maybe I'm missing something? I've done a search of the MS PPT
templates online at
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/CT011323751033.aspx but the few
I've found where the title area on slide or title master have a fill, the
fill effect is achieved by also using a background box rather than applying
the fill to the title textbox itself. Is there a reason for this?

 

[Sonia]

They probably used a black rectangle for consistency - to make sure that the
black background is always the same size regardless of the text. If you use a
black fill for the text box, the black portion will be controlled by the length
of the text, so it will vary from slide to slide.
--

Sonia Coleman
Microsoft PowerPoint MVP Team
Autorun Software, Templates and Tutorials
http://www.soniacoleman.com

 

[Mary]

Thanks Sonia. I thought that if the title text box was set to a defined size
rather than using "resize autoshape to fit text" that the title textbox size
would remain consistent. I can define the size of the title box on the
master but on the slides themselves, just like you said, the black portion
is controlled by the length of the text. Where is this autofitting coming
from? If I create a random text box on a slide, I can set a defined size
which is independent of the amount of text typed in the box.

So if the background box has to stay, I'm still puzzled by this: on the
Title Master, both the background box and title box are set to 0.81" high,
both with black fill an no line. They look OK in Normal View but in Slide
Show, the title box appears higher than the background box producing a
slight but still noticeable projection top and bottom. I suppose the
solution is to make the title box shorter in height than the background but
I'm wondering why there is an apparent difference in height?

 

[Sonia]

I would give the text box "no fill" on the Master.