Whether you are student or are employed in an organization you can agree with me that in most presentations, whether in the meeting, conference, major assessment projects, and etc, PowerPoint presentations are common. If you are employed, particularly the top, middle and supervisory level, your work may require you to do a lot of presentations to different audiences. If you are at the top level, you might delegate the preparation of power point slides of your presentation to an IT person or a staff who is technically component to do that and you provide the details.
However, when you have a situation where you have limited time to prepare or need to include some information from a previous presentation, it does get tense and put you under pressure. So here is how you can easily get a PowerPoint slide done in these types of situations with ease. Here are the steps.
Step 1: Do You Have the information in a previous presentation PowerPoint file
The first question that needs to be asked first is “do I the information in a previous presentation I did?” If you have, then you don’t need to create the slide again. You will just plug in the needed slides into your current power point file. Why waste time recreating it when you already have it!
- Create a new PowerPoint file for your current presentation. Add the first slides which normally includes the outline and the introductory part (Eg title, presentor Title, dates, etc). Format the slide by clicking on DesignèThemes and choose a Variant theme of your choice.
- Once the preliminary slides are done, you are ready to drop in your content slides from the previous presentation. Click InsertèNew Slidesèclick on the down arrowèReuse Slides command. See figure 1. PowerPoint will automatically add the Reuse Slides pane on the right of powerpoint window/screen (See figure 2)
Figure 1-Reuse slide button
Figure 2. Reuse Slide Pane
3: Click the Browse button and locate your previous PowerPoint file from which you want to extract the content slides from and select the file. The Click Open from the Browse dialog box. The slides in the file will be displayed as thumb nails in the Reuse Slides pane for you to select and insert.
4: Double Click on the Slides you want to take from the previous file and slides will be automatically added to your slide. If you want to all slides, just right-mouse click on any of the slides in the Reuse Slides pane and click Insert All Slides. Also, if you want to keep the formatting of the slides as it’s original, you can check the Keep source formatting check box at the bottom of the Reuse Slides pane.
Step 2: Rearrange and Edit
Once you have inserted the needed slides from the previous presentation you can close the Reuse Slides pane to clear it from the screen. Now, you can do a quick arrange to arrange the slides in the order you need.
- To Edit the slides (Insert new Slide, Duplicate Slide, Delete Slide, Copy and Paste Slides), simply right mouse click on the a slide thumbnail on the Slides Pane on the left of your screen and the shortcut menu will show you all these options. The short cut meu is more quicker than accessing it through the Home tabèClipboard and Slides command groups. These command groups contain these same format commands.
Figure 3. Edit Slides
- Once the formatting is completed, now, it’s a matter of rearranging the slides to make sure your information follows the required sequence and logic. This is important because, if the slides are not in order, it may confuse yourself as presenter and also the audience as well.
- Click on View tabèClick Slide Sorter under Presentation Views commands. The slides will then be thumb nailed and displayed with their number of appearance or sequence order.
Figure 4: Slide Sorter View
- Click on the Slides thumbnail and without releasing the mouse, you can drag them and position them in the order of your choice. Once you have ordered in the order required, its time to test your presentation.
- Click on Slide Show tabèclick Form Beginning. Run through the presentation and you can make any changes if need. Otherwise, you are ready to go and present .