A PowerPoint background is an individual graphics file that can be applied to new or existing Business PowerPoint presentations as the background for the Title Master, Slide Master, or selected as backgrounds for individual slides.

They are available commercially and for free from a number of sites. Check out the link for further resources.

Because a PowerPoint background is a graphic image, (different to a PPT template), they don’t contain any text formatting or layout design as a template would do, but can instead be used as a basis for building your own PPT template.

Backgrounds can be inserted in PowerPoint 2007 by first going to the slide master:

Select the slide master

SHIFT-Click the “Normal slide view” button.

Right click the background of the Master Title slide and select “Format Background”.

Slide background

There are then four types of background to choose from:

i) A texture ii) An image from a file iii) An image from the clipboard iv) A piece of clipart.

Select one of those four, choose relevant options and click “Apply to all”.

This will put this background image on every slide, irrespective of the template settings which affect text style and positioning too.