[CRITICAL UPDATE - Anyone using Office 2003 should install the critical
update as soon as possible. From PowerPoint, choose "Help -> Check for
Updates".]
Hello Ward,
The slide autolayouts determine what placeholders are included in new
slides. Since the "Title Slide" autolayout contains both a Title and a
Subtitle placeholder, a new Title Slide will always contain both
placeholders. You cannot change this behavior. By deleting the "Subtitle
Area for Autolayouts" from the Title master all you have really done is
tell PowerPoint to use it's default behaviors to determine the location and
formatting of the Subtitle placeholder when using the Title Slide
autolayout. What you would really need to do is to create a custom Title
only autolayout which doesn't contain a subtitle placeholder, however
PowerPoint does not have the capability of creating/adding custom
placeholders to the slide master and/or creating/adding customer slide
layouts which would take advantage of such custom placeholders. With
multiple master feature in PowerPoint 2002 and 2003 you can create a
variety of almost identical slide masters with different behaviors
(animations) and placement of title and object areas for AutoLayouts so
that when used in conjunction with the existing autolayouts you can get
some additional flexibility but you are still limited to the number and
type of placeholders on in the masters to those that are listed in the
"Master Layout" dialog and still limted to the number and type of slide
autolayouts that are currently available.
For your particular scenarion, one workaround is to create slides that are
laid out and formatted the way you want and then you can use the Duplicate
Slide command (or just copy/paste) to make a new copy of the slide each
time you need to create a slide that uses the same layout/formatting.
Of course, if you (or anyone else reading this message) feel strongly that
some kind feature for creating custom placeholders and/or slide autolayouts
should be a built-in feature in PowerPoint, don't forget to send your
feedback (in YOUR OWN WORDS, please) to Microsoft at:
http://register.microsoft.com/mswish/suggestion.asp
As with all product suggestions, it's important that you not just state
your wish but also WHY it is important to you that your product suggestion
be implemented by Microsoft. Microsoft receives thousands of product
suggestions every day and we read each one but, in any given product
development cycle, there are only sufficient resources to address the ones
that are most important to our customers so take the extra time to state
your case as clearly and completely as possible.
IMPORTANT: Each submission should be a single suggestion (not a list of
suggestions).
John Langhans
Microsoft Corporation
Supportability Program Manager
Microsoft Office PowerPoint for Windows
Microsoft Office Picture Manager for Windows
For FAQ's, highlights and top issues, visit the Microsoft PowerPoint
support center at:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?pr=ppt
Search the Microsoft Knowledge Base at:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?pr=kbhowto
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