Add Slides to a Presentation That Fit In

Adding slides from one presentation into another and hoping for a button that will automatically format the slides the way needed is just not a feature in PowerPoint. But, the almost magical “Destination vs. Source Formatting” button does exist. For this tutorial, we are going to add slides from the “Blue” presentation (Presentation #1) to the “Purple” presentation (Presentation #2) and make all of the slides the same, so they are all purple.

Here is our “blue” presentation (#1):

And here is our “purple” presentation (#2):

Select the slides from Presentation #1 and copy. The paste them into Presentation #2. To paste in the new slides, right-click and in the pop-up menu in the “Paste Options” sections select “Use Destination Theme:”

With the USE DESTINATION THEME option, the template for the new slides is assigned to the template used on the slide in front of the insert point. So now all of the blue slides are changed to the purple template.

*Note: There is no “magic” button and with this example the text boxes, background, colors used, etc. were all setup correctly using the template formatting (which also means it is a real template). When updating to the new (purple) template all of the master slide formatting carries over just fine. But there are lots of times when things are not based on template formatting and need to be manually updated (ie. no magic format button).

– Troy @ TLC