From the questions I see in the newsgroup and in my inbox, I know that a large percentage of the presentations created are not created from scratch. Instead, they are built by taking slides from different presentation files and putting them together into a single file. Sometimes you want to keep the original formatting when you add the slides and sometimes you want to change the slides to match the new file. Both of these are possible by using Insert–> Slides From File.

Available in PowerPoint 2002 and later, inserting slides from files allows you to create a presentation file that contains many different looks without re-creating content. We are going to look at how to do the inserts and how not to do the inserts.

Let’s start with the interface itself. Go to the Insert menu and choose Slides From File. The following will appear on your screen:

When you first bring it up, the file name and the slides to select will be blank. Navigate to the presentation you want to add using the browse button. As soon as you select a file, miniatures for each slide will show up in the “Select slides:” area. You can select a single slide by clicking on the miniature of the slide. Multiple slides are selected using either click, control click, or shift click.

Before you click either insert or insert all, you need to decide whether you want the slide to keep its original formatting or get the formatting of your current file. If you want it to keep its own formatting, check the “Keep source formatting” box. If you want it to look like the other slides in your new file, don’t check the box.

Once you have decided about the formatting, click the Insert button to insert just the selected slides into the file or the Insert All button to add all the slides from the source file. No matter which option you select, the slides will be inserted into your presentation immediately after the current slide.

When you click Insert or Insert All, you will not leave the insert slides interface. This feature is built on the notion that you would rather add multiple slide sets without leaving the interface. That’s good if you have several files with the slides you need to add. However, if you are a habitual double clicker, this can be a problem. Every time you click one of the insert buttons, the slides will be added to the presentation. So, if you select a number of slides, click insert, then select another set of slides without deselecting the first set, you will get two copies of the first set of slides in your presentation.

How do you prevent duplicate copies of slides? One way is to go back through the slides and unselect the ones you selected. However, since that is a tedious process for longer files, I recommend you instead change the view of the slides in the interface. If you look just above the slide miniatures, there are two icons, one that looks like a filmstrip and another that looks like a list with a slide next to it. The filmstrip view is the one you see above. The other one looks like this:

To use this version of the interface, click on the first slide title that you want inserted, then shift click to select a range of slides or control click to select individual slides. Because the titles are now in a row, you can tell at a glance which slides were inserted last round. Select any slide title without either the control or shift key, and the selected slides are unselected.

Now that you know how to add slides and not lose their formatting, let me give you a word of caution. Inserting slides from other files is a good way to save re-work. But, since you are actually adding copies of the slides, you are creating more than one place the slides need to be updated if the originals change.

In addition, if you are going to use this feature, be careful how many different backgrounds you use in any given file. You want the backgrounds to enhance your message, not drown it out.