Easily reuse slides from existing presentations

Microsoft PowerPoint allows you to reuse slides from an existing presentation and insert them into a new presentation without the need to open the old presentation. The Reuse slide option also allows you to keep the original formatting or apply the formatting used in your new presentation. I use this technique quite often when I’m preparing a presentation for training sessions.

To reuse slides, follow these steps:

1. Open the new presentation where you would like to insert the existing slides to
2. From the Home tab click the bottom half of the New Slide button to display the drop-down menu

3. Select Reuse Slides from the bottom of the menu
4. The Reuse Slides pane will appear:

5. Click the Browse button and choose Browse File
6. Navigate to the location of the existing presentation which contains the slides you wish to reuse
7. Once you have located the presentation, select it and click Open
8. The slides will now be displayed in the pane:

9. If you are unsure or cannot read the content of each slide, simply hover your mouse over the thumbnail and a larger preview will be displayed
10. To insert a slide into your presentation, click on the slide once with the left mouse button
11. If you wish to retain the original source formatting, tick the box at the bottom of the pane for Keep source formatting, if not then the slides will be inserted into your presentation and will be formatted the same as your new presentation’s slides

This method provides a quick and efficient way of reusing slide content within multiple slides and allowing you to reduce the need to reformat slide information.