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Slide masters, layouts, the template name and embedded fonts: what a PowerPoint template leaves in a deck

Last updated: 19 October 2026

Speaker notes, hidden slides and comments are in notes and hidden slides before sharing. This page is about what sits behind the slides.

What a template brings with it

• Slide masters and layouts. Microsoft's page What is a slide master in PowerPoint? says "the master slide is the top slide in the thumbnail pane", and that layouts are changed and managed in Slide Master view. In the file (the .pptx format is ECMA-376), each master is a part under ppt/slideMasters with a list of its layouts, and each layout is a part under ppt/slideLayouts. The list does not depend on which layouts the slides use, so an unused layout is saved like any other.
• The theme. Colours, fonts and effects are in a theme part under ppt/theme, with a name of its own.
• The template's name. The file's extended properties (docProps/app.xml) have a Template element for the name of the template the document was based on.
• Embedded fonts. If the template or the deck embeds fonts, the font data is saved in the file (ppt/fonts, listed in ppt/presentation.xml). Microsoft's page Benefits of embedding custom fonts describes the setting, Embed fonts in the file, under File › Options › Save.

What can be on a master or a layout

• Visible items such as a logo, a footer line or a confidentiality notice. These appear on every slide that uses the layout, so you can see them, but they may belong to whoever the template was made for.
• Anything on a layout no slide uses. A layout made for another client, with their name in a placeholder or a note to the designer, does not appear on any slide.
• Hidden and off-slide shapes on a master or layout, hidden in the Selection Pane or placed outside the slide area. They do not appear even on the slides that use the layout.
• Names. Each master, layout and theme can have a name. A name such as "Client X title" says where the template came from.

Finding them

1. Microsoft's page says: "To open Slide Master view, on the View tab, select Slide Master". The thumbnail pane shows each master with its layouts below it.
2. Select each master and each layout in turn. Look at what is on it and around it; zoom out to see the area outside the slide.
3. With a layout selected, open the Selection Pane to list every shape on it, including hidden ones.

Microsoft's Document Inspector page lists, for PowerPoint, an Invisible On-Slide Content inspector for "objects that are not visible because they are formatted as invisible", and an Off-Slide Content inspector. It does not say whether they look at masters and layouts, and it does not mention templates, layouts or embedded fonts. Go through Slide Master view yourself.

Taking them out

1. Delete layouts no slide needs. Microsoft's page Customize a slide master describes it: in the thumbnail pane, select each layout you want to remove, then select Delete on the Slide Master tab. A master with many unused layouts may be better replaced by a clean one.
2. Delete hidden and off-slide shapes on the masters and layouts you keep, and replace logos and footer text that belong to someone else.
3. Remove the document properties with Document Inspector (File › Info › Check for Issues › Inspect Document), or set them by hand.
4. Decide on the fonts. Microsoft's embedding page says that to remove the embedding, you can turn off the Embed setting in the same options and save; the next time the file is opened, a different font is used in its place. Check the slides afterwards, because a substitute font can change line breaks.
5. Save, and check the saved copy with the steps below.

Microsoft's slide-master page also notes that PowerPoint for Microsoft 365 on Windows, when a presentation has 25 or more slide masters, opens a message box offering to remove the unused ones.

What ScrubDrop does with them

ScrubDrop reads the .pptx in your browser; the file is not uploaded. For free, it lists hidden shapes and shapes outside the slide on every master and layout, used by a slide or not, along with the document properties and the other kinds of hidden data. The free version removes the document properties, including the template name, and comments, from one file at a time. Removing the hidden and off-slide shapes from masters and layouts is part of ScrubDrop Pro; when Pro removes hidden slides, a layout that only those slides used goes with them.

ScrubDrop does not delete layouts that no slide uses, and it does not change what is visible on a master or layout, or the names of masters, layouts and the theme. Those are content, and only you can tell whether they belong in the deck. It keeps embedded fonts, because they draw the text. After removing, it reads the result again with separate parsers and offers it only if nothing of the chosen categories remains.

How to check this yourself

1. Make a copy of the .pptx, rename it to .zip and unzip it.
2. Count the files in ppt/slideLayouts. Each slide's .rels file in ppt/slides/_rels names the one layout it uses; the layouts no slide names are the unused ones.
3. Search the layout and master files for <a:t> to read their text, and for hidden="1" or hidden="true" on shape properties to find hidden shapes. The name attribute of each <p:cSld is the layout's or master's name.
4. Open docProps/app.xml and look for <Template>.
5. A ppt/fonts folder means fonts are embedded; <p:embeddedFont> in ppt/presentation.xml names them.

Questions

Sources: the Microsoft pages linked on this page were checked on 19 October 2026.