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Using a PowerPoint Presentation as a "Main Slide Deck" and copying slides from it to create Individual Presentations that are Updated when changes are made to "Main Slide Deck"

Anonymous
2022-01-28T20:11:08+00:00

Hello all,

The company that I work for is currently transitioning away from Google Drive/Slides and is moving all company documents into Office 365. One of the current functionalities of Google Drive that works amazingly well for our cross-functional workflow is the ability to have a single slide deck that is created by our marketing team. This slide deck is then used by individual client services managers to create their own slide deck in which they copy slides from the slide deck created by marketing ("Main Slide Deck"). The marketing team updates their slide deck on occasion and specific functionality for this update in Google Drive allows client service managers to visit the slide(s) that has been updated and is prompted to manually "Update" their version of the slide when changes have been made by the marketing team.

I have been tasked with determining how to keep the functionality of Google Drive's slides copy/update feature intact within PowerPoint/SharePoint/Office 365. I am looking for something that keeps our new process for handling this as similar as possible to the old way in Google. I have already used Office 365 to create two separate slide decks for testing this and haven't found something that quite works. For example, I was able to use the Reuse Slides feature to pull in a copy of a slide from the "marketing team's" slide deck, but when changes were made in the original "marketing" presentation there was no opportunity to automatically/manually update the slide in the "client success manager's" slide deck.

For further information or perhaps an insight into this process, I can include screenshots of an email chain between myself and a superior that is also trying to help me through this process.

Thank you in advance for your replies!

Best,

MarkBej

Microsoft 365 and Office | PowerPoint | For business | Windows

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  1. Steve Rindsberg 99,161 Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2022-01-29T16:58:33+00:00

    Chitrahaas is correct, PowerPoint isn't able to do this. At least not on its own.

    At one point, in conjunction with one of MS' other products ... SharePoint, perhaps ... there was the idea of slide libraries, and if you had a slide from one of the libraries in your presentation, PPT would warn you if the source slide had been updated and let you choose to update your copy to match. For some reason, that feature's been removed.

    But there are also dozens of third party slide library-type programs, and I'm fairly sure that some of them will do automatic updating. It'd be worth asking Google.

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  2. Anonymous
    2022-01-28T20:34:48+00:00

    Hello Mark,

    Generally, the layout structure or formatting for the slides of the PowerPoint presentation comes from the Slide Master in the same PowerPoint presentation, and if there is a change in the Slides of Slide Master, it will reflect the changes for the layouts in the slides of the presentation.

    About Slide Master: What is a slide master? (microsoft.com)

    However, as your requirement is to update the content automatically for the slides in the presentation which is re-used, AFAIK, there is no similar feature to meet your requirement.

    So, I request you submit the feedback to the related team via app feedback in the PowerPoint app, reference: How do I give feedback on Microsoft Office?

    At last, I will keep this thread open, so PowerPoint experts and MVPs in this community can share their ideas and views on this requirement.

    Best Regards,

    Chitrahaas

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