Reusing and Copying Slides

Quick reference

• 00:03 This video covers the reuse slides feature in PowerPoint and it’ll save you so much time by not having to recreate your slides numerous
• 00:10 times. But please don’t ever use this as the first option or the method to create your presentation; you should create an outline of a
• 00:17 presentation from a storyboard and then consider which slides you can reuse from other presentations. So let’s begin. I’m in the process
• 00:24 of constructing a presentation for a conference next year, and I’d like to reuse some slides that I used last year. So within PowerPoint, I‘ve got
• 00:32 my target presentation open, and a few slides that are already constructed. I click the little drop down arrow on the new slide button, then
• 00:40 click the reuse slides menu item and we get the reuse slides task pane. Now our options are to browse to a slide library and that allows us to
• 00:50 access slides from a Microsoft Office SharePoint Library and that option will only work if you have a slide library set up for you and a
• 00:57 systems administrator would need to do that. And it’s quite often used in large companies. Or we could browse to the file and this brings up a
• 01:04 dialog box so that we can find the particular presentation, and this is the method that we will use in the remainder of this video. So we browse
• 01:12 for the location of the file on the computer, select it, and click the open button. And there is the selected file now open in the reuse slides
• 01:20 task pane and it displays individual slide previews, as well as their slide titles if they are in fact entered. Now it’s important to remember
• 01:28 that slides will be inserted after the selected slide in the active presentation and you need to be a bit careful here because any slide that you
• 01:36 click on here will immediately be placed in the presentation. So let’s have a look at our options. First, right click, insert slide. So this inserts the
• 01:46 slide that you select into the active presentation, and the slide will use the theme of the active presentation. CTRL Z to undo that. Insert all
• 01:56 slides, inserts all slides here into the active presentation, and again the slides use the theme of the active presentation. CTRL Z to
• 02:05 undo again. Apply theme to all slides; this option will apply that theme of the selected slide to all slides in the active presentation, but no
• 02:15 actual slides are inserted, and undo that. Apply theme to selected slides; so this option will apply the theme of the selected slide here to the
• 02:26 selected slides in the active presentation and no actual slides are inserted, so again you would need to work out which slides you wish to apply
• 02:35 that to and select them and if no slide is selected it will apply formatting to the current active slide. Now the slides that I’d like to select
• 02:43 in the reuse slides task pane are the last three and I’d like to insert them after slide 3 in my active presentation, but I also need to keep the
• 02:52 source formatting. So first, I select the slide in the active presentation that I’d like to insert slides after, which is slide 3. I click the
• 03:01 checkbox to keep the source formatting, and then I just need to decide which method I’ll use to insert the slides. If I right click and select
• 03:09 insert all slides, I will get slide 1 as well, and I could do that and then simply delete that later on but that’s not really suitable if you’ve got,
• 03:17 say, 30 slides in a presentation. Or it’s just as easy to click on slide 2, slide 3, and slide 4, and there they are inserted in the correct location
• 03:28 and the source formatting is kept. Now finally, another easy option; let’s just open that presentation in PowerPoint, so browse to it and
• 03:39 select the file. Now we go to the view tab on the ribbon. Now I’ve actually got two presentations open but you can only see one at a time, so
• 03:47 when I click the arrange all button, suddenly we’ve got both presentations side by side and we can simply drag across and drop from our
• 03:55 source presentation into the target. We select the little smart tag drop down button to keep source formatting, or we can use the destination
• 04:03 theme. Very simple. And it works with copy and paste as well, and that’s the subject of another video. So remember the PowerPoint feature to
• 04:10 reuse your slides. It will save time and effort, but you can also copy and paste out of other presentations or drag and drop. But reuse slides
• 04:17 is a very good method as well, particularly when you get a thumbnail of all the slides and you transfer across the formatting very easily as
• 04:24 well, but please don’t ever use this feature just as a method to construct your presentation from scratch. Always build a presentation from a
• 04:33 storyboard and use the outline feature and that’s covered in other videos.

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