How to Combine PowerPoint Templates

At some point you might face the need to combine PowerPoint templates or presentations. Whether it’s to add something new to the old or maybe you purchased templates that you would like to combine. There are several ways on how to combine PowerPoint templates and I’m going to share few of them with you in this articles.

1. Drag and drop / Copy and Paste

This is probably the easiest and fastest way to do it: simply drag and drop the slides from one presentation to another. This works at least on PowerPoint 2013 and 2016. You can also just copy and paste the slides by selecting the slide (to select multiple slides, hold control and select the slides) right clicking it and selecting Copy. Then open the second presentation and paste the slides there by right clicking the spot on the slides pane where you want to add the copy.

When pasting you have 3 options:

1. Use destination theme
2. Keep source formatting
3. Picture (this will be an un-editable picture of the slide)

2. Reuse slides

If you need to bring in several slides or even all slides from a presentation, this might be a easier way to merge presentations. What you do is open a presentation or you can even start with a fresh new presentation, then on the Home tab select the New Slide drop down and Reuse Slides.

From the Reuse Slides sidebar, select Open PowerPoint File

Select the presentation you want to bring in slides from and the slides will open up on the Reuse Slides sidebar. What you’ll want to do first is to select the ‘Keep Source Formatting’. Now go and select the slides you want to add by simply clicking on the slides. You can also right click the slides on the sidebar and select Insert Slides or Insert All Slides. You can select the location in the presentation where to add them or you can re-organize your slides later by using the Slide Sorter (View -> Slide Sorter). Drag and drop the slides in the order you like.

3. Merge PowerPoint templates

There is also a third way to do this and that’s by going to the Review tab and selecting Compare. The compare option will compare or combine another presentation with your current one. Select Compare -> select presentation and hit ok. On the right sidebar you can see the revisions and can accept or reject changes.

Edit the slide masters

Which ever method you choose it’s a good idea to check to what’s going on the slide master. If your header and footer differs, you can quickly change the layout by right clicking on the slide you want to edit, select Layout and select the master you want to use. And there you go, your slide layout is updated. After you have updated the layouts you can delete the un-used slide masters.

Slideson

Free professional PowerPoint and Google Slides presentation templates. Boost your presentations with Slideson! Want to write for us? Become a contributor.