Locked lesson.
About this lesson
Reuse existing slides from another presentation, and retain the theme of that presentation if you wish.
Lesson versions
Multiple versions of this lesson are available, choose the appropriate version for you:
Exercise files
Download the ‘before’ and ‘after’ PowerPoint presentations from the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.
Reusing and Copying Slides.pptx256 KB Reusing and Copying Slides - Complete.pptx
1.4 MB
Quick reference
Topic
Reusing slides – to save time.
When to use
When you have pre-existing slides that can be easily used again.
Instructions
- On the Home tab, in the Slides group, click the arrow below the New Slide button and click Reuse Slides.
- You have these options:
- Browse to a slide library – which is sometimes available in a corporate environment and will need to be installed by IT staff.
- Browse to a file – the method used in the remainder of this cheat sheet.
- Browse to a file and in the dialogue box select a presentation, and click Open.
- Various slides appear in the Reuse Slides pane.
- When you right-click a thumbnail, these options become available:
- Insert Slide – inserts the selected slide into the active presentation and the slide adopts the theme of the active presentation.
- Insert All Slides – inserts all slides into the active presentation and all slides adopt the theme of the active presentation.
- Apply Theme to All Slides – applies the theme of the selected slide to all slides in the active presentation. No slides are inserted.
- Apply Theme to Selected Slides – applies the theme of the selected slide to the selected slides in the active presentation. No slides are inserted.
Also note:
In general, it’s poor practice to reuse slides instead of properly constructing a storyboard and creating a presentation.
Any thumbnail that you click in the Reuse Slides pane will immediately be inserted into the presentation after the current slide selected.
Login to download- 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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