Microsoft Has Removed PowerPoint’s Reuse Slides Feature

If you’ve ever built a presentation by pulling in slides from previous decks, you’ll know how useful the Reuse Slides panel was.

Open the panel, browse another presentation, pick the slides you need, choose whether to keep the original formatting. Done. No switching between files, no copy and paste issues, no reformatting headaches.

It was one of those features that didn’t get much attention, but the people who used it relied on it heavily.

Microsoft has now retired it.

Why it’s been removed

According to Microsoft, Reuse Slides was removed because there are other ways to achieve the same result. Maintaining overlapping features no longer makes sense for them.

That reasoning is fair enough from a development perspective. But for teams who used Reuse Slides regularly, it means relearning how to do something that used to take seconds.

What you can do instead

There are two main workarounds, and both get the job done.

The first is to open both PowerPoint files at the same time and drag slides from one window to the other. This keeps most of your formatting, animations, and media intact. It works well when you need several slides and don’t mind having two windows open.

The second option is to use View, then New Window. This opens a duplicate view of your current presentation, which is helpful if you want to compare versions or pull content without affecting your original file.

Neither method is quite as smooth as the old Reuse Slides panel. You lose the ability to preview slides before inserting them, and dragging between windows can occasionally cause minor formatting quirks that need tidying up.

But they work. And once your team gets used to the extra step, it becomes second nature.

Why this matters for businesses

Teams that create a lot of presentations, whether for clients, internal training, or sales, often reuse the same slides across multiple decks. Company introductions, service overviews, pricing pages. The kind of content that stays consistent but appears in different contexts.

Reuse Slides made that fast and reliable. Without it, there’s slightly more friction in the process. Not a disaster, but worth flagging so nobody wastes time looking for a feature that no longer exists.

What to do now

Let your team know the feature is gone before someone spends twenty minutes trying to find it. A quick message explaining the drag and drop method will save confusion later.

If you use PowerPoint templates across your business, this is also a good time to make sure everyone knows where they’re stored and how to access them consistently.

If your team needs a hand getting up to speed with changes in Microsoft 365, we’re happy to help. Contact us or fill out the form below.