Discover PowerPoint placeholders — designed to make slide creation faster, easier, and more visually compelling. With smarter prompts, broader media support, and customizable layouts via Slide Master view, placeholders help you create polished, professional presentations with minimal effort.
In PowerPoint, placeholders are those built-in boxes that make adding stuff like text, pictures, charts, or videos, super easy. You’ve almost certainly seen these placeholders in the a default PowerPoint slide.
They act like a built-in design guide—helping your slides stay clean and consistently styled, so everything looks polished without the extra effort. Plus, since they come pre-formatted, you don’t have to worry about styling each element from the scratch—PowerPoint does the heavy lifting for you.
As you can see, the above slide has two rectangular boxes:
The top one’s meant for your title—it gives you a prompt to type and takes care of the font, size, and color for you automatically.
The bottom one’s for the main content. You can pop in text, tables, charts, SmartArt, images, or even videos—it’s all hinted at by the icons right in the middle. This part has been updated in PowerPoint 365
You can customize the appearance of these boxes by navigating to the Slide Master view. To actually add your content, you can just use the Normal view.
Adding Placeholders
Start by launching a new presentation or pick one you’ve already made.
Select the slide layout where you want to create a placeholder.
You will notice a list of slide layouts on the left side. PowerPoint has a bunch of layout options like Title Slide, Title and Content, Two Content, and more.
Navigate to View |Slide Master. You can now customize the layouts your slides use.
In Slide Master view, Just select the one where you want to add your placeholder.
For example, if you want to add another content box/picture box, you could go with the “Title and Content” layout.
Once you have selected the layout you want, click the “Insert Placeholder” button under the Slide Master tab.
You will see options like:
- Content (horizontal or vertical)
- Text (horizontal or vertical)
- Picture
- Chart
- Table
- SmartArt
- Media
- Online image
- Cameo
Select the placeholder you want to add on to your slide.
Adding a Picture Placeholder
When you select the Picture placeholder, PowerPoint adds a new Master Layout to your presentation.
Use your cursor to draw the image box on the slide—size and position it however you like. From then on, anytime you use that layout, the placeholder will show up.
By default, it’s a rectangle, but you can easily change its shape in the layout view if you want something different.
Changing Placeholder Shapes
To change the shape of a picture placeholder, first select the picture placeholder, then go to the shape Format tab, select Edit Shapes, and click on Change Shape.
You will see a dropdown with different shape options—just choose the one you want for your placeholder.
The selected shape will then show up on the placeholder slide.
You can add more placeholders to your slide layout the same way you added the picture one. Once you are done, just close the Slide Master view. Your new custom layout is ready to use in your presentation.
Replace Default Placeholders in a Theme
To replace default text placeholders with image placeholders in a PowerPoint theme, start by navigating to Slide Master View. Select the specific layout you want to modify, such as “Title & Content.” Delete the existing text placeholder, then insert a new one—either a Picture or Content placeholder, depending on your needs.
After inserting, you can resize or reposition it as desired. Once you are done editing the layout, close the Slide Master View.
The changes will be saved to the theme, and you can apply this modified layout to any slide in your presentation.
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