How does PowerPoint determine whether a layout is the title slide layout?

I created a PowerPoint with templates containing four master slides: one for dark-themed title slides, one for dark-themed content slides, and two more of the same with a light theme. In the content slides, I made sure to add placeholders to contain the slide numbers, footers, date, and logo. On the title slides, I removed all placeholders except for the page number on section headers.

I tested my template by adding some slides. I added the header and footer using Insert → Header & Footer and checked the box “Don't show on title slide.” This works as expected for all the title slides I created, but on some of the content slides, the header and footer will not show up, while other content slides with different layouts work fine. It is as if PowerPoint thinks one of my content slide layouts is a title layout! How can I fix this?

Solution 1:

It is not possible to explicitly tell PowerPoint whether to treat your layout as a title layout for header/footer/number/date purposes. PowerPoint always treats the first layout listed under a master slide as a title slide. I have not found any way to change this behavior. This means that you cannot create a master slide and use it only for content layouts, because PowerPoint will always treat layout #1 (no matter what you name it) as a title slide layout:

This behavior (or bug?) is completely separate from the fact that you can exclude placeholders from title layouts besides the first one, and PowerPoint won't add them when you add headers and footers.