Every slide in a presentation is associated with a slide master, making this the most commonly used master page. Every presentation must have a minimum of one slide master (in this case, each slide would be associated with the single slide master). However, a presentation can also contain multiple slide masters and you are able to choose which slide master to associate with each slide.

Only the more recent versions of PowerPoint (2003 and later) provide a user interface for managing multiple master slides (PowerPoint calls master slides 'designs'). While earlier versions (pre-2003) allow multiple master slides, these cannot be managed via the user interface.

If a presentation has only one slide master, this is the primary slide master and is associated with all slides in the presentation. A slide master cannot be removed from a presentation while it is the only slide master.

If a presentation has more than one slide master, the first slide master is the primary slide master. This means that all slides will be associated with the primary slide master unless they are reassociated with another slide master.

Conversely, if you remove a slide master from a presentation, the library reassociates all slides that used it with the first (primary) slide master in the presentation.

If you have multiple slide masters in a presentation, you are able to reorder these (see Ordering Slide Masters later in this section). This is a handy feature for reassigning the role of primary (first) slide master.

Creating a new slide master adds it as the last slide master in a presentation. You can then use the order method (see Ordering Slide Masters below) for changing its order in the presentation.

To create a new slide master in a presentation use the factory method in the Presentation class:

Clipboard createSlideMaster() [Presentation]

Given that a presentation can have multiple slide masters, each slide master is assigned a design name. This property reflects the name of the design template used by PowerPoint when applying different design templates to slides. You get and set the design name using methods in the SlideMaster class.

To get the design name of the slide master use:

java.lang.String getDesignName()

To set the design name of the slide master use:

void setDesignName(java.lang.String name)

Reordering slide masters in a presentation changes which slide master is (by default) the first (and primary) slide master.

There is a standard paradigm for ordering any element (e.g. master slide or content slide) in PowerPoint. You can use one of four options:

When using the order method, you must use one of these pre-defined directions.

To reorder a slide master in a presentation use:

void order(int direction)

To get the existing title master associated with a slide master use:

TitleMaster getTitleMaster()

To paste a title master into a slide master use:

TitleMaster pasteTitleMaster(Clipboard clipboard)

There can only be one title master associated with each slide master. Pasting in a new title master will replace any existing title master.