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How to quickly change the size of your slides to widescreen

Posted in PowerPoint Features, PowerPoint Help, Tips and Tricks

You can easily change the aspect ratio of your entire presentation with these basic steps

To change the slide size:

  1. Select the Design tab of the toolbar ribbon.
  2. Select Slide Size near the far right end of the toolbar.
  3. Select Standard (4:3 aspect ratio) or Widescreen (16:9) or Custom Slide Size.
Comparison of standard and widescreen slide-size ratios
  1. On the Design tab of the Ribbon, locate Slide Size in the Customize group, near the far right end of the toolbar.
  2. Select Slide Size, and then select either Standard (4:3) or Widescreen (16:9).When PowerPoint is unable to automatically scale your content, it prompts you with two options:
    • Maximize: Select this option to increase the size of your slide content when you are scaling to a larger slide size. Choosing this option could result in your content not fitting on the slide.
    • Ensure Fit: Select this option to decrease the size of your content when scaling to a smaller slide size. This could make your content appear smaller, but you’ll be able to see all content on your slide.

The 16:9 widescreen setting is the default value for new presentations you create. When you change the slide size for a presentation, the size you choose only applies to that presentation.  However, you can make it easy to create a new 4:3 presentation for yourself whenever you want—by defining a custom theme that uses the 4:3 aspect ratio. See the section below named “Make a default size to start from when creating new presentations.”

Sizing applies to all slides in a presentation

Some folks have asked about resizing one slide within a presentation. PowerPoint isn’t able to do that. All slides in a presentation are the same size.

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