Reuse slides feature doesn't allow you to select specific slides (imports entire presentation)

Question

I'm trying to insert slides from another presentation and when I go to "Reuse" slides, rather than bringing up the interface for allowing me to select specific slides from another presentation, it imports the entire presentation into my slide deck.  Has this feature changed?  Is there a new way to import specific slides from another presentation?

Answer 1

The paste option 'Keep Source Formatting' worked! 

Here's what I was trying to do: insert a set of slides from one presentation (source) into another (target) while preserving the formatting of the slides from the source. The problem I was experiencing was when I chose 'New Slide/Reuse Slides...' it would insert all the source slides but use the target format, which isn't what I wanted.

So here's what I did:

• Open target presentation
• Open source presentation
• Copy first slide from source presentation
• Paste into target presentation where desired, using the 'Keep Source Formatting' option (you have to use the Paste drop-down from the ribbon bar on the Home ribbon)
• Choose 'New Slide/Reuse Slides...'
• Choose the source presentation
• All the slides will be inserted into the target and preserving the source presentation format

I agree I liked how it worked better prior to the 2016 version, but at least we can recover this functionality!

Answer 2

Not so much a new way as the old tried and true:

Open both the presentation you want to insert slides INTO and the one you want to insert slides FROM.  Put both in sorter view, then select and copy the slides you want to insert, switch to the other presentation, put the cursor where you want the new slides to appear and then paste.

Drag and Drop would work as well ... which you choose will depend on what you're doing and what you best like.

Answer 3

Thanks so much!

Answer 4

Yeah, that should work, but have you tried it? Help me out with this...

I'm finding a lot of undesirable issues such as omission of Backgrounds [1] & other Master Slide elements as well as aspect ratio conflicts [2].

\[1\] Copying a slide from a presentation to another does not copy the slide background

\[2\] Office for Mac 2016 - importing slides from another pptx/ppt file - you can now only import ALL of them?

Answer 5

I'll admit that I haven't tried it in 2016.  I'll wait until the software's out of beta and at least within shouting distance of "Finished" before I'm willing to install it.  

Question for you:  does it work correctly when you bring ALL of the slides from another presentation in?  Other than the fact that you can't select just a subset of them to keep until after they're all imported, of course.

Moving from one slide aspect ratio to another is a different problem, one we're likely to run into no matter what.  If the slides are set to the same height, the distortion's minimized (something MS failed to recognize in earlier Windows versions, where they kept the slide width constant and varied the height to get wide-screen ratio slides; after an AHA moment, they changed this in PPT 2013;  now wide-screen and 4:3 slides are all the same height, so shapes no longer get distorted so easily.)

And there's another question:  what's the default slide size for widescreen slides in 2016/Mac?