2.15 How to Copy and Paste Slides Between Templates

Many of us will give many different PowerPoint presentations in our careers and lives. Pre-built templates make things easier by letting us fill in placeholders instead of building a presentation from scratch. But even so, making completely new presentations over and over can get tedious fast. Sometimes slides from one presentation could be easily reused in another. Let's look at how to do just that. It's as easy as copying and pasting from one presentation into another. I'm working in a new PowerPoint presentation here, and as you can see, this is an introduction of my fictional company. I've put a lot of work into this, and I think it looks great. But as you can see, all I have here is text and images. I want to add an infographic showing where my team is located around the globe. The presentation doesn't have a pre-built slide template for that, and I don't have time to build one from scratch. Luckily, I remember making a similar chart in a past presentation. I wanna take that slide and move it to my new presentation here. The first thing I need to do is locate the slide or slides I want to copy from the old presentation. I'll jump over to it, and you can see the globe infographic I built. This is the slide I want to add to my new presentation. Over here in the side bar, I'll make sure the slide is selected. If I wanted to multi-select or copy multiple slides, I could just hold down Ctrl on Windows or Cmd on Mac, and click to select multiple slides. In this case, however, I only want this one slide, so I'll just go ahead and copy it to my clipboard. Then I'll jump back to my new presentation. My next step is to decide exactly where I want to paste the infographic slide. Looking at my options here on the left side, I think it would fit perfectly between the slides called who we are and what we do. I'll click once in the empty space between the two slides. You'll see this line appear, which tells me that I've selected that gap to insert a new slide. Then I'll go ahead and paste. Instantly, you'll see the slide from the old presentation appear in the new one. Now, here you have two options. By default, PowerPoint matched the colors and style of the pasted slide to my new presentation. In other words, the layout stays the same, but the colors match the theme of the new presentation. In many cases, this is great, but let's suppose that I want to paste the slide in but maintain its original colors. To do that, I'll click on the copy dropdown in the corner of the new slide thumbnail. You'll see this pop-up called Paste Options. Now, by default, PowerPoint uses the paste option Use Destination Theme, which means it converts to match. To keep things in their original style, I'll click this center option, which is called Keep Source Formatting. You'll see the slide revert to the colors of the old presentation. In general, when you're pasting, PowerPoint does a great job, but sometimes layouts and formatting don't convert exactly right. In this case, things look perfect. But sometimes you may need to rearrange the slide just by clicking and dragging content placeholders back into their original positions. As you can see, copying and pasting slides between templates is a wonderful time-saving technique that keeps you from doing the same work twice. Stay tuned for a recap of the course and a look back at what you've learned. Thanks for watching.