Reusing your existing slides can be a great help: first you need not recreate stuff you already have and secondly you
are saving so much time that you can use more effectively to practice your presentation! Having said that, always start by
creating an outline of your
presentation. Thereafter reuse any existing slides. PowerPoint provides a quick command that locates specific slides,
and enables you to add it to the active presentation. While this process works the same way in all versions of
PowerPoint, there are small interface changes. In this tutorial, we'll show you how to reuse slides in
PowerPoint 2013 for Windows:
- Within PowerPoint, open your existing presentation, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Presentation opened within PowerPoint 2013
Note: Copied slides will always be inserted after the selected slide in the active presentation.
- Select the slide after which you want to add new slides. Thereafter, access the Home tab of
the Ribbon, and click the lower half of
the New Slide button (highlighted in red within Figure 2)
to bring up the drop-down menu that you see in Figure 2. Within the drop-down menu, select the
Reuse Slides option (highlighted in blue within Figure 2).
Figure 2: Reuse Slides option
- This will open the Reuse Slides
Task Pane, as shown highlighted in
red within Figure 3.
Figure 3: Reuse Slides Task Pane
- Within the Reuse Slides Task Pane click the Browse button to bring up a
context menu with two options, as shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4: Browse button context menu
Browse Slide Library lets you access slides from a Microsoft Office SharePoint Library. This option
will only work if a Slide Library is set up for you -- slide libraries are only set up by large companies. If you work in
a large company, ask your system administrator to set this up for you.
Browse File brings up a dialog that lets you locate the presentation on your computer. The rest of
instructions on this page assume you chose this option.
- Choose the Browse File option to bring up the Browse dialog box as shown
in Figure 5. Locate the presentation you want to use as a source to import slides, and click the
Open button.
Figure 5: Browse dialog box
- The selected file will be opened within the Reuse Slides Task Pane displaying individual
slide previews and their corresponding slide titles, that can be seen in Figure 6.
Figure 6: Slides in Reuse Slides Task Pane
Note: To retain the slide formatting of the original slide, make sure to select the
Keep source formatting check-box (highlighted in red, refer to
Figure 6 above). If you do not select this check-box, the copied slide will take on the slide formatting
using the design template of the new presentation.
- To add a slide, just click on it within the Task Pane. Otherwise, right-click on a slide and from the contextual menu
that appears (see Figure 7), choose an option. These options are explained below:
Figure 7: Insert slide(s) options
Insert Slide: This will insert the slide into the active presentation and the slide will use the Theme of
the active presentation.
Insert All Slides: This will insert all the slides into the active presentation and all the the slides
will use the Theme of the active presentation.
Apply Theme to All Slides: This option will apply the Theme of the selected slide to all the slides in
the active presentation. No actual slides are inserted.
Apply Theme to Selected Slides: This option will apply the Theme of the selected slide to selected slides
in the active presentation. No actual slides are inserted.
- In Figure 8, you can see that the selected slide has been added to the new presentation below the
first slide.
Figure 8: Added selected slide to the active presentation
- Save the presentation.
Additionally, you can also reuse older slides using the drag and drop process, this is explained in our
Reuse Slides through Drag and
Drop in PowerPoint 2013 tutorial.
See Also:
Reuse Slides in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows
Reuse Slides in PowerPoint 2011
for Mac
Reuse Slides in PowerPoint
2010 for Windows
Reuse Slides in
PowerPoint 2008 for Mac
Reuse Slides in PowerPoint
2007 for Windows
Reuse Slides in PowerPoint
2003 for Windows
