In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to correctly add slides numbers (or page numbers) to your PowerPoint presentation so that they are easy to update and manage.

And if your slide numbers are NOT showing up properly, see the troubleshooting and advanced trouble shooting sections below (one of those should fix it for you).

When it comes to adding your slide numbers, the last thing you want to do is get frustrated and manually add them to each and every one of your slides…

This is a classic 101 PowerPoint mistake.

Not only will it take you forever to add them this way, if something changes in the future (which always happens) it will then take you forever to fix them again.

Instead, just like any common element you want to have on ALL of your slides, you want to use your Slide Master to update and manage your slide numbers, as explained below.

If you need additional help navigating what you SHOULD and SHOULDN'T be doing on your PowerPoint slide master, see our guide on building custom PowerPoint templates here.

To navigate to the Slide Master view in PowerPoint, simply:

1. Navigate to the View tab in your Ribbon
2. Select Slide Master

If you frequently need to use your Slide Master, I recommend learning the below hidden Slide Master jump shortcut (top shortcut #1 below)

​In the Master Layout Dialog box (this is also where you can also add a Footer or Date field to your Slide Master), make sure you have a check mark next to Slide Number, and then hit OK to close the Master Layout dialog box.

​With the slide number added to your Master Slide, you can now format and/or place it wherever you want. I’ve placed mine in the upper right-hand corner of my slide.

With your slide number properly set and formatted, you can then close the Slide Master View by selecting the Close Master View command in the Slide Master Tab of your PowerPoint ribbon.

Back in the Normal View of your PowerPoint presentation, you now need to insert the slide numbers. So from the Insert tab, select the Slide Number command to launch the Header and Footer dialog box.

​Within the Header and Footer dialog box, make sure there is a check mark next to ‘Slide number’ (in the upper right-hand corner of the dialog box, you’ll find a preview of where the slide number will be placed within the slide) and then down below select either: 

• Apply, to apply the slide number only to the individual slide you are working on.
• Apply to All, to apply slide numbers to all of the slides within your PowerPoint presentation (slide numbers will not appear on any slide layouts where you manually removed the slide number while in the Slide Master View of your deck).

What if you properly add your slide numbers and they are still not showing up in your slides?

If for whatever reason the objects you set on your Slide Master are either not showing up correctly or showing up in the wrong position (maybe you accidentally nudge an object…it happens), the fastest way to fix this is to reset the slide layout.

If after resetting your slide layout, your objects still do not revert back to the correct position, or show up correctly, it could be one of a couple things:

1. The objects themselves are not correctly positioned on your slide master, so simply go back to the master and adjust them;
2. You have duplicate slide layouts. In this case, you” need to change the layout of your slide to the correct one by selecting it from the Layout drop down menu.

Then, go back to your Slide Master View and make sure you delete the duplicate layouts.

If you've done everything correctly as described above and your slide numbers are STILL not showing up in your slides, try these additional 4 trouble shooting tricks in the video below.

Have you ever needed to add a total at the end of your slide numbers to show how many pages your document has?

While there's no automatic way to do this in PowerPoint, there is a simple manual method that you can use.

In this video you'll learn how to set up a running total for your slide numbers in PowerPoint and more importantly, what can go wrong when setting them up.