How to Select Multiple or All Slides in Your PowerPoint Presentation

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Being able to efficiently select multiple or all slides in your PowerPoint presentation is an invaluable time-saving skill. Whether you want to apply formatting changes across several slides, rearrange their order, duplicate them, or delete a group of slides, it helps tremendously to be able to multi-select rather than having to work on one slide at a time.

In this comprehensive guide, you’ll learn several methods for selecting multiple or all slides in PowerPoint quickly and easily.

Select All Slides

To select all the slides in your presentation at once:

  1. Click on the first slide thumbnail on the left side to select it
  2. Press Ctrl+A (Windows) or Command+A (Mac) to select all slides

All slides will now have a selection border around them. You can then perform actions like changing the slide layout, adding transitions, or rearranging slide order on all slides simultaneously.

Alternative Methods to Select All Slides

There are a couple other ways to select all slides as well:

  • Slide Sorter View: Go to View > Slide Sorter. Click the first slide, press and hold Shift, then click the last slide.
  • Selection Pane: Go to Home > Select > Selection Pane. Click the checkbox next to “Slides” at the top to select all.

Select Multiple Consecutive Slides

To select a group of slides that are next to each other in your presentation:

  1. Click on the first slide in the group to select it
  2. Press and hold Shift
  3. Click on the last slide you want included in your selection
  4. Release the Shift key

This will select that consecutive range of slides. You can then work on just that group of slides.

Select Multiple Non-Consecutive Slides

To select multiple slides that are not next to each other:

  1. Click on the first slide you want to select
  2. Press and hold Ctrl (Windows) or Command (Mac)
  3. Click on each additional slide you want to add to the selection
  4. Release Ctrl or Command when done

This lets you choose individual slides in any order and perform batch actions on them.

Rearrange Slide Order

Once you’ve selected a group of slides using any of the above methods, you can quickly rearrange their order. With the slides selected:

  1. Click and drag the selection border around the slides
  2. Drag the slides left or right to the location you want
  3. Let go of the mouse button to drop the slides into their new position

The slide order will be updated instantly.

Remove a Few Slides from an All Slide Selection

If you selected all slides but then decide you don’t want to include a couple slides in your multiple slide selection:

  1. With all slides still selected, press and hold Ctrl (Windows) or Command (Mac)
  2. Click on any slides you want to remove from the selection
  3. Release Ctrl or Command

The clicked slides will be deselected and removed from the selection.

Keyboard Shortcuts for Selecting Slides

Here is a quick reference of the keyboard shortcuts covered above for selecting multiple slides in PowerPoint:

Windows Shortcuts

  • Select all slides: Ctrl+A
  • Select consecutive slides: Click first slide, Shift+click last slide
  • Select non-consecutive slides: Click first slide, Ctrl+click additional slides
  • Deselect slides from a multiple selection: Ctrl+click slides to remove

Mac Shortcuts

  • Select all slides: Command+A
  • Select consecutive slides: Click first slide, Shift+click last slide
  • Select non-consecutive slides: Click first slide, Command+click additional slides
  • Deselect slides from a multiple selection: Command+click slides to remove

Video Demonstration

Here is a quick video demonstrating the process of selecting multiple and non-consecutive slides in PowerPoint:

How to select multiple slides in PowerPoint

Knowing how to efficiently select and work with multiple slides will save you tremendous time when building your PowerPoint presentations. Use these best practices to improve your productivity.

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