How to Merge PowerPoint Presentations?

Whether you are a company manager, a member of the project team, a student or a teacher, making presentations is something you have to deal with from time to time. In such a situation, Microsoft PowerPoint (PPT) is a powerful tool for creating a captivating and accurate presentation for your audience. However, even when you have prepared your slides perfectly, you can easily confuse and lose your audience during the presentation, especially when you need to fetch your content from multiple presentations or presenting as a team. In this guide, we will show you how to merge multiple PPTs to prevent errors when making presentations.

Related: How to fix slow PowerPoint and speed up your presentations?

Why Merge PowerPoint Presentations?

Learning how to combine presentations into a single seamless file offers several benefits including:

• You look organized and professional – Organizing your presentation into a single neat file improves the flow of the presentation, and is a sign of professionalism and organization.
• Avoids time wasting – Merging individual PPTs into one saves time as you don’t have to switch between files/slides looking for the correct content.
• It is a sign of teamwork – You can create a master presentation as a team to avoid the awkward pause as the next presenter tries to load their part of the presentation.
• It gives you flexibility – It allows you to deliver your content clearly using different themes or layouts as well as maintain the formatting of the original presentation.

There are several ways of combining individual presentations to enhance the flow of ideas during a PPT presentation.

Method 1: Using “Hyperlink” to Merge Presentations in PowerPoint

One of the simplest ways is to combine by linking the main/master presentation to the other individual presentations.

• First, it is a good practice to save your presentations on the same computer, preferably the same storage drive/folder.
• Now open the master presentation and create a new slide where you want to insert the content from the other file.
• Type something in the new slide to describe the presentation that follows.
• Highlight the text and under the “Insert” tab click on “Actions”.

• The “Action Settings” dialogue will appear. Check the “Hyperlink to” option and click the arrow to expand the options.

• Select the “Other PPT…” option and on the resulting pop-up, browse to select the PPT file that you want to merge with and click “Ok”.

• You can choose the slide where you want the presentation to pick from. If you want to merge the entire presentation, select the first slide and click “Ok”.

• Your description will now appear as a link that upon click will open the specific slide you selected above.

Related: PowerPoint tips to improve your productivity.

Method 2: Merging Presentations with Reuse Slides Feature

The Reuse Slides method comes handy when you want to match maintain the theme of the master presentation all through, as well as when you want to selectively insert slides from another PPT file.

• Click the space between the two slides where you want to import the slides and then under the “Insert” tab click the “New Slide” arrow.
• At the bottom of the resulting menu, select “Reuse Slides…”.

• From the pop-up that appears, click the link to open a PPT file or the “Browse” button to choose a file from your PC storage.

• This will display thumbnails of the slides from the second presentation where you can click a particular slide to add it into the main presentation.
• The added slides will automatically take the theme of the master presentation, but you can retain the original theme by checking the “Keep source formatting” box at the bottom of the pop-up.
• Once done, close the Reuse Slides pop-up.

Method 3: Embedding a Presentation into Another

Another way you can combine separate presentations is by embedding the PPT file as an object. Unlike method 2 above, embedding a presentation will maintain its animations and transitions effects.

• Add a new slide, go to “Insert” and select “Object” from the ribbon.
• On the resulting dialogue, check the option to create an object from file and click the “Browse…” button.
• Select the file that you want to embed and then click “Ok”.

• This will add the first slide of the external presentation into the current slide. You may need to drag the embedded PPT to fit the size of the current slide.

• You can also set the embedded presentation to play when you get to that slide.
• To do so, select the object and go to the “Animations” tab. Click the arrow to expand the animation options and select “OLE Action Verbs” at the bottom of the menu.

• Select “Show” on the resulting pop-up and then click “Ok”.

Note: With the hyperlink method, if you edit the content of the original presentation, it will automatically update the slides in the master PPT but if you used the insert object method, you can edit embed and the original PPT independently.

Conclusion

When presenting from multiple PPT files or when making a team presentation, combining the various presentations into a single master presentation can save you time and help you avoid errors. Besides, this makes your presentation look professional and neat. Fortunately, MS PowerPoint enables users to merge presentations using the above three options depending on objectives and taste.