Headers and footers in PowerPoint are ideal for displaying descriptive content, such as slide numbers, author info, the date and time, and more. We’ll show you how to easily insert or edit info in a header or footer in PowerPoint.
How to Insert Headers and Footers in PowerPoint
To insert headers and footers in PowerPoint, open your presentation, and then click “Insert.”
In the “Text” group, click “Header and Footer.”
When the window opens, you’ll be in the “Slide” tab. You can select any of the following options to add them to your slides:
Date and time Slide number Footer
You might notice that there isn’t an option for a header. This is because headers aren’t actually available on slides, but there’s a simple work-around for this we’ll cover below.
RELATED: How to Add a Header or Footer to a Word Document
After you make your selections, you can see in the “Preview” on the right where they’ll appear on the slide.
Type the text you want to appear in the footer in the text box under “Footer.” You can select the “Don’t Show on Title Slide” option if you don’t want PowerPoint to add the text to the title slide of your presentation.
After you have everything the way you want it, click “Apply” to add your content to the currently selected slide. We clicked “Apply to All” to add our content to all slides in our presentation.
The content now appears at the bottom of the PowerPoint presentation slides you selected.
This is difficult to see, though—let’s edit it!
How to Edit Headers and Footers in PowerPoint
There are a couple of ways you can edit headers and footers in PowerPoint. Since each slide in your PowerPoint presentation is likely different, you might only need to edit something on a single slide. If that’s the case, just click the content and edit it as you would any other text in that slide.
You can edit the format of the text, too. Just click and drag your cursor over the text you want to edit to highlight it, and then use the formatting tools in the pop-up menu.
If you want to edit the footer on all of your slides, you can do so by going back to Insert > Header and Footer, but the formatting options aren’t available there.
If you want to change the font size and color of the footer text on all slides, select “Slide Master” in the “Master Views” section under the “View” tab.
Click the top slide in the left pane.
Then, highlight and edit the footer text in this slide. We changed our font size to 14 pt., and the color to red.
When you switch back to View > Normal, your changes will appear on all slides.
How to Add a Header in PowerPoint
Adding a header isn’t so much of a hack, as it is just adding a new text box to the top of your slide. You can do this in the Slide Master, so it will then appear on every slide in your presentation.
To do this, navigate to View > Slide Master to open the Slide Master. Select the top slide, go to the “Text” group under the “Insert” tab, and then click “Text Box.”
Click and dragging your cursor to draw a header text box in the appropriate location, and then type your text.
When you return to View > Normal, your new header box will appear at the top of each slide.
