Trying to create a presentation quickly can be unpleasant, because they take time! If you’re lucky, you can piece together parts of other presentations, add a few new slides, and save the day. In this article, I’ll show you two ways to use what already exists to create new presentations. Even when you’re not pressed for time, you’ll want to use these time-saving features:
- Reuse Slides
- Custom Slide Show
PowerPoint’s Reuse Slides feature lets you quickly add slides from one presentation into another. Why recreate what you already have?
Reuse Slides
You could cut and paste slides from one presentation into another, but that’s a bit awkward at best. Fortunately, there’s an easier way – Reuse Slides. I’ll illustrate this feature’s value by adding a slide from the PowerPoint template Classroom – Open House.pptx (or any presentation) in Normal view:
- In the slide pane to the left, click in the space between the slides where you want to insert slides from another presentation.
- On the Home tab, click the New Slide drop-down (in the Slides group) and choose Reuse Slides from the bottom of the list.
- Doing so will open the Reuse Slides pane (to the right).
- Click the Open A PowerPoint File link.
- Use the resulting Browse dialog to locate the presentation file that contains the slides you want.
- Select it and click Open.
- PowerPoint will display all the slides from that presentation in the Reuse Slides pane.
- At this point, you can insert slides:
- Click a slide thumbnail in the Reuse Slides pane to select it.
- Click the Insert button.
- PowerPoint inserts the slide into the open presentation immediately underneath the currently selected slide.
With your PowerPoint files combined, you can then save your merged file by clicking File > Save or Save As.
Advantages
- Allows you to insert slides from multiple presentations into one main presentation.
- Gives you formatting options for inserted slides. You can choose to keep source formatting to retain the original look of inserted slides, or use destination theme to make them match the style of the presentation you are inserting them into.
- Easy to move inserted slides around afterwards within the presentation.
Copying and Pasting Slides
While the “Reuse Slides” method allows you to change the format of your slides before you insert, you can also combine PowerPoint files by copying the slides from one open PowerPoint file and pasting them into another.
To do this:
- Open both presentations you want to combine, each in a separate PowerPoint window.
- In one file, select the slides you want to copy from the slide thumbnail pane.
- Copy the selected slides (Ctrl+C / ⌘+C).
- Switch to the other PowerPoint window and paste the content (Ctrl+V / ⌘+V).
- The copied slides will be inserted starting after the currently selected slide.
This method keeps all original formatting intact when merging presentations.
Advantages
- Retains exact slide design and theme of inserted slides.
- Quick way to combine when consistent formatting is not important.
Disadvantages
- Inserted slides may look out of place if presentations had very different themes and formatting.
- No way to bulk insert slides – need to copy and paste sets of slides one by one.
- Harder to reorder slides after pasting them.
Whether you need to quickly piece together a presentation at the last minute or want to repurpose existing slides, using Reuse Slides and copying/pasting will help you avoid rebuilding content from scratch. Give them a try the next time you need to consolidate presentations!
Custom Slide Shows
In addition to merging entire presentations using the techniques above, you can also put together a custom presentation using a subset of slides from one or more existing presentations using PowerPoint’s Custom Slide Show tool.
To build a custom show:
- Open the presentation(s) containing slides you want to reuse.
- Switch to Slide Sorter view in PowerPoint.
- Ctrl + Click (⌘ + Click on Mac) to select the exact set of slides you want in your custom show. To select a continuous range, click the first slide, then Shift + Click the last one.
- Go to Slide Show tab > Custom Slide Show > Custom Shows.
- Choose New from the drop down menu.
- Give your new custom show a name > Click OK.
PowerPoint will save the custom slide show to the presentation. You can present just those slides by selecting the custom show from the Custom Slide Show menu.
Advantages
- Create custom presentations from a large deck without copying slides.
- Easily update a custom show if main presentation slides are edited later.
- Present only a specific segment of slides for a given audience.
Whether you need to quickly piece together a presentation at the last minute or want to repurpose existing slides, using Reuse Slides and copying/pasting will help you avoid rebuilding content from scratch. Give them a try the next time you need to consolidate presentations!
