When you are using Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 or 2010, beautiful slide templates are already built in. Also, there are several hundreds and even thousands of PowerPoint templates available for free download in various websites that work for both PowerPoint 2007 and 2010.
However, when you are working with a template, all slides are identically designed. That is, the first slide is unique, then the rest of the slides follow identical template design every time you add a new blank slide.
How about if you want a completely different template or slide? This is why this article or tutorial is created to answer such questions as
- How to use another template in a particular slide so that it will deviate from the rest of the slides?
- How can I use templates I already used from other presentation?
- How to make slides in the presentation template-independent?
To answer this question, you need to learn how to re-use existing slides. Here are the steps:
- Open PowerPoint
- When you click on the Design view, you can pick a template to use
- When the template is selected, try adding few slides and you will notice that the first slide is unique but the next succeeding slides (slide 2 onwards) are exactly the same
- Now, our goal is to pick a template, then be able to add or insert succeeding slides that will not be the same as slides 2 onwards. This is done by using the “re-use” slides”
- Now, select Slide 3 in the slides panel in the left
- Click on Home tab or menu
- Under Slides group, click on the New Slides button
- At the bottom of the pull-down menu that shows up, click on Reuse Slides….
NOTE: Do not click on the upper part of the New Slides button with the paper icon, since it will automatically create a new slide using the current template. Click instead on the word “New Slide” itself with the small down-arrow next to it to get the pull-down menu where Reuse Slides… is located
- Then a Reuse Slides panel will appear docked in the right side of the screen
- You need to click on the Browse button to locate your other existing presentations where the slide templates will be based from
- Then click on the right-arrow button to show the slides’ preview
- Also make sure that the check box at the bottom part that says “Keep source formatting” is checked
- Now, when you click on any slide in the preview, it will insert that selected slide after the active slide in the current file
- When you create another slide, the template is already changed to the inserted or reused slide
- You can then add another slides of different template by going to the Reuse Slides panel in the right side of the window doing the same steps described above. In this case, since the entire slide with its contents are used, you need to delete the contents and enter new ones if your purpose of re-using slides is only to apply template designs for the current slide.
NOTE: The procedures above were done using Microsoft PowerPoint 2010.