Locked lesson.
About this lesson
Reuse existing slides from another presentation, and retain the theme of that presentation if you wish.
Lesson versions
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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 - Completed.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.
- 00:04 This video covers the reuse slides feature in PowerPoint and it will save you so
- 00:08 much time by not having to recreate your slides numerous times.
- 00:12 But please don't ever use this as the first option or
- 00:14 the method to create your presentation.
- 00:17 You should create an outline of a presentation from a storyboard, and
- 00:20 then consider which slides you can reuse from other presentations.
- 00:24 So, let's begin.
- 00:26 I'm in the process of constructing a presentation that I'll need to use
- 00:29 shortly, and I'd like to reuse some slides that I used last year.
- 00:34 So within PowerPoint, I've got my target presentation open and
- 00:38 a few slides that are already constructed.
- 00:41 I click the little dropdown arrow on the New Slide button,
- 00:44 then click the Reuse Slides menu item and we get the Reuse Slides task pane.
- 00:50 Now our options are to browse to a slide library and
- 00:53 that allows us to access slides from a Microsoft Office SharePoint library.
- 00:58 And that option will only work if you have a slide library set up for you and
- 01:02 a systems administrator would need to do that.
- 01:05 It's quite often used in large companies.
- 01:07 Or we could browse to the file, and this brings up a dialog box so
- 01:11 that we can find a particular presentation.
- 01:14 This is the method we will use in the remainder of this video.
- 01:18 So, we browse for the location of the file on the computer, select it and
- 01:23 click the open button.
- 01:26 And there is the selected file, now open in the reused slides task pane.
- 01:31 And it displays individual slide previews as well as the slide titles,
- 01:35 if they are in fact entered.
- 01:38 Now it's important to remember that slides will be inserted after the selected
- 01:42 slide in the active presentation, and you need to be a bit careful here because any
- 01:47 slide that you click on here will immediately be placed in the presentation.
- 01:52 So let's have a look at our options.
- 01:54 First Right click, insert slide, so
- 01:58 this inserts the slide you that you select into the active presentation, and
- 02:03 the slide will use the theme of the active presentation, Control Z to undo that.
- 02:10 Insert all slides, inserts all slides here into the active presentation and again
- 02:16 the slides use the theme of the active presentation, Control Z to undo again.
- 02:23 Apply theme to all slides,
- 02:25 this option will provide that theme of the selected slide,
- 02:28 to all slides in the active presentation but no active slides are inserted.
- 02:34 And undo that, apply theme to selected slides so,
- 02:39 this option will apply the theme of the selected slides here to the selected
- 02:44 slides in the active presentation and now actual slides are inserted.
- 02:50 So, again you would need to work out which slides you wish to apply that to and
- 02:54 select them.
- 02:55 And if no slide is selected, it will apply full matting to the current active slide.
- 03:00 Now the slides that I'd like to select in the Reuse Slides task pane,
- 03:04 are the last three.
- 03:06 And I'd like to insert them after slide 2 in my active presentation,
- 03:11 but I also need to keep the source formatting.
- 03:14 So first I select the slide in the active presentation that I'd like
- 03:18 to insert the slides after which is two.
- 03:20 I click the check box to keep the source formatting and
- 03:25 then I just need to decide which method I'll use to insert the slides.
- 03:29 If I right click and select insert all slides, I will get all of the slides.
- 03:35 And I could do that and then simply delete that one later on.
- 03:40 But that's not really suitable if you have lots and lots of slides.
- 03:44 Where it's just as easy to click on this slide and this one and this one and
- 03:48 they are inserted in the correct location and the source formatting is kept.
- 03:53 And finally another easy option, let's just open that presentation in Powerpoint,
- 03:58 so browse to it and select the file.
- 04:01 Now we go to the view tab on the ribbon.
- 04:02 Now I've actually got two presentations open, but you can only see one at a time.
- 04:07 So when I click the Arrange All button,
- 04:09 suddenly we've got both presentations side-by-side and
- 04:13 we can simply drag across and drop from our source presentation into the target.
- 04:17 We select the little smart tag drop-down button to keep source formatting, or
- 04:22 we can use the destination theme.
- 04:25 Very simple and it works with copy and paste as well and
- 04:27 that's the subject of another video.
- 04:30 So, remember the PowerPoint feature that we use in the slides,
- 04:33 it will save time and effort but, you can also copy and
- 04:36 paste out of other presentations or drag and drop.
- 04:39 But, reuse slides is very good, particularly when you get a thumbnail
- 04:43 of all the slides and you can transfer across the formatting very easily as well.
- 04:48 But please don't ever use this feature just as a method to construct your
- 04:51 presentation from scratch.
- 04:53 Always build a presentation from storyboard and
- 04:55 use the outline feature that's covered in other videos.
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