Duplicating and Reordering Slides

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About this lesson

Reuse existing slides in your current presentation to save development time, as well as changing the order in which your slides play within a slideshow.

Lesson versions

Multiple versions of this lesson are available, choose the appropriate version for you:

2010, 2013, 2016, 2019/365.

Exercise files

Download the ‘before’ and ‘after’ PowerPoint presentations from the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.

Duplicating and Reordering Slides.pptx
2.8 MB Duplicating and Reordering Slides - Complete.pptx
2.9 MB

Quick reference

Topic

Duplicating slides – to reuse them in a presentation.

When to use

To save time by using existing slides instead of creating new slides and content from scratch.

Instructions

  • In either the Slides Pane or the Slide Sorter view:
    • Right-click a thumbnail in the Slide Pane view and select Duplicate Slide.
    • Select a slide thumbnail in the Slide Pane and use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+D.
    • Select the slide thumbnail in the Slide Pane and hold down the Ctrl key while dragging with the pointer to drop to a new location.
  • More than one slide can be selected by clicking a slide with the pointer, and then clicking a second or more slides while holding down the Ctrl key. The slides can then be duplicated by dragging with the pointer while holding down the CTR key.

Also note:

Slides can also be reused by copying and pasting – you can use the smart tag drop-down arrow to select from various paste options.

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  • 00:03 This video is all about duplicating and reusing slides and frankly why wouldn’t you because if you’ve got beautiful slides laid out, whether
  • 00:11 you’ve got charts on them or graphics and particularly complex animations it makes sense to reuse slides where you can and move them
  • 00:18 around in your presentation rather than creating new stuff. Now I've got a presentation that needs a bit of work it’s got a formatted chart on it here
  • 00:25 and it’s got animation applied to that. I have a table where I can start entering some content as well as a suggested SmartArt diagram here.
  • 00:33 Now I’m particularly interested in the chart because if I go to reading view, which is running a presentation in a window, I get the chart
  • 00:41 animating in category 1; category 2; category 3; category 4 and I may have done quite a bit of work to actually produce this chart. The really
  • 00:51 good thing is it's so easy to duplicate that slide through a number of mechanisms. First in our slide thumbnail here and if you can't see this
  • 00:59 particular view go to the view tab and make sure that you click on the normal view. You can right click on the thumbnail and go duplicate slide
  • 01:07 and you can have exactly the same slide with placeholders and chart and all of the customization been done to it as well as the
  • 01:15 same animation all set up ready to go. So delete that slide with the keyboard DEL key. You can also go CTRL D on the keyboard, and
  • 01:23 make sure you’ve got the slide selected when you do that or you’ll get a different result, and CTRL D is the keyboard shortcut to duplicate
  • 01:31 whatever is selected and it works in most cases. So hit the DEL key. And in fact you can drag the slide to a new location, hold the CTRL
  • 01:41 key and that duplicates the slide as well, which is very handy. I use it all the time. If we go to our slide sorter view we can see our four slides, so
  • 01:50 this particular slide, I can go CTRL D and there it is so let’s delete that slide again. I can also drag and drop to duplicate so if I drag to a new
  • 02:01 location it changes the order of the slides, but if I hold the CTRL key while I drag and drop it’s duplicated to that new location. And so I’ll just
  • 02:10 leave it there and there are our 2 slides. Now this also works on more than one slide at a time. So I can select slide 2 with the mouse,
  • 02:19 hold the SHIFT key and select slide 4, and that selects all of the slides in that particular sequence, go CTRL D and that sequence is
  • 02:28 duplicated. CTRL Z to undo, or with these slides already selected I can drag, hold the CTRL key and drop and there they are duplicated as well,
  • 02:40 undo. Now I can do exactly the same thing with slides that are not side by side or part of the same sequence, so select slide 2, hold the
  • 02:50 CTRL key and select slide 4, and then CTRL D to duplicate and there they are. Control Z to undo but also if I click with the mouse and drag
  • 03:02 to a new location holding the CTRL key they’re duplicated when I drop and that’s very handy. Now the good thing about duplicating slides is
  • 03:10 that not only are the objects on the slide duplicated, but so are any objects that are animated, as well as any slide transitions
  • 03:18 assigned to the slide will be applied to the duplicated slides as well. So we can check that by clicking this little animate icon under the
  • 03:24 original slide with the chart and that fires the animation preview on that thumbnail. When we do the same under the duplicated slide we get
  • 03:33 exactly the same animation sequence. Note also that you can copy and move slides from one presentation to another and that’s the
  • 03:41 subject of another video. So always consider duplicating your slides within a presentation to save time in work and design and construction.
  • 03:50 It allows you to duplicate slides that may contain charts, or tables, SmartArt diagrams and animations and transitions also duplicate
  • 04:00 with the slide if they’re applied to it. But you can also copy and paste and that allows you to have the option to select the formatting from either
  • 04:07 the source presentation or the destination presentation. So whether you duplicate slides within a presentation or between presentations,
  • 04:16 it will save you time and it’s well worth exploring.

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