Reuse your best slides with this PowerPoint feature

Using slides from another PowerPoint presentation is a convenient way to save effort and time for a professional result. It is possible that we have a good slide that we have used previously but that we can use for our current work. In this case, you can add one or more to the current presentation without having to reopen the file to make changes.

This way, not only will we keep all the animations and other settings when importing them, but we can also make it adopt the theme that we are currently working on, so it will be very useful for us to be able to take advantage of all its content and not have to recreate it from scratch.

To carry out this task, Microsoft’s office automation tool has a practical import function called “Re-import slides”, which we will talk about next.

Steps to import slides from another presentation

The first thing we are going to do is the PowerPoint presentation that we are working on or we are going to start creating in which we want to import and reuse certain slides. Next, we select the correct location within our presentation where we want the imported slide to appear.

Mark the place to insert

Suppose we want to include it between position three and four, so we will have to click in the space between one and the other, so that a red line will appear right in the space where we want to add the slide that we are going to import.

Later, within the toolbar we go to the Home tab and click on the down arrow that we find in the “New slide” button. This will open a new drop-down menu in which we must select the option shown at the bottom called “Reuse slides”.

Once this is done, a new panel will appear on the right side from where we can browse our files and select the presentation from which we want to import the slide, directly open a slide library, a PowerPoint file, etc. We do this by selecting the “Browse” button or clicking on the “Open a PowerPoint file” option and navigating to the file that contains the slides we want to import.

Add the slide to the presentation

Once the file is selected, it will show us all the slides that are part of that file within this panel. From there, we can select the one we need to reuse to incorporate it into the new presentation. Next, we will see how the bar is completed with all the slides of that presentation, so we can do one of the following:

• If we want to insert a single slide, just click on it in the sidebar. The slide will appear in your current presentation using the style and format it was set to.
• In the event that we want to insert a slide and keep its original format, we must check the “Keep the original format” box at the bottom of the sidebar.
• If we want to include all slides, we right-click on any slide in the list and choose “Insert All Slides”.
• We can choose to keep the original slide theme or even apply that theme to all slides. To do this, we right-click on one of the slides and select “Apply theme to selected slides” or “Apply theme to all slides”, respectively.

In this simple way it is possible to reuse slides that we have previously created and take advantage of them in our new project.

Reuse Slides doesn’t appear

Although the reuse slides function is really useful, sometimes we can run into problems that prevent us from carrying out this function. In the event that errors arise or that the “Reuse slides” function simply does not appear, within the “New slide” tab, we can do the following:

Update PowerPoint

If we find this error or the available function does not appear, it may be because we are using an old version. That is why it is convenient that we update to the latest version available, since it not only includes the correction of security and stability errors but also the integration of new functionalities.

This is something that we must do by clicking on the “File” tab and then we click on “Account”. From here click on the “Office Updates” section and then on “Update Now”. Once this is done, PowerPoint will start updating.

Repair Office

If the problem persists, we can always choose to reinstall office. First of all, we make sure we have a backup of our files and then we access the Settings menu. To do this, press the Windows + I keyboard shortcut. Once here, click on Applications and then on Applications and features.

This will open a new window where we will find our entire list of applications installed on the computer. Here we must look for the one corresponding to the version of Office that we have or Microsoft 365. In the case that we use Windows 10 we click on it and in Windows 11 we click on the three vertical points. In both cases the Modify option will appear. We press it and a new window will appear, where we choose Quick Repair.

Remove and reinstall Office

In the event that the problem persists, we can try to uninstall Office completely and perform a clean installation again. In this case, the first thing will be to make sure to close any problem that we had open. Later we return again to the Configuration menu. Click on the Applications and Applications and features section.

Once here, we select our version of Office or Microsoft 365 again, but now we choose the Uninstall option. We wait for the process to finish and then we download it again from the Microsoft website and we install it. Once finished we should have no more problems and the Reuse Slides feature should be present and working properly.