Microsoft PowerPoint 2007: Troubleshooting Pasted Slides

by AJ George 

Here's the scenario: You are an eLearning developer and receive a PowerPoint presentation from another party (a client, colleague, SME, etc). You've decided to paste some of the slides into another PowerPoint presentation following your own finely crafted master layouts. After you do this, you notice the formatting didn't quite take. Perhaps the bullets are positioned incorrectly. Maybe the title is incorrectly formatted. The whole thing is a big ol' mess. The cause is most likely that your presentation source did not use a master slide, or did not use standard content placeholders. Try this to clean up the mess.

1. Open the presentation into which you want to paste slides.
2. View the slides in Slide Sorter View by choosing View > Presentation Views > Slide Sorter.
3. Open the presentation from which you want to copy slides.
4. View the slides in Slide Sorter View by choosing View > Presentation Views > Slide Sorter.
5. From within that second presentation, copy the slide to be pasted by selecting the slide and pressing [Ctrl] [C] on your keyboard.

Note: If you are choosing more than one consecutive slide, hold down the [Shift] key while you select the first and last consecutive slides and then press the Copycommand. If you are choosing non-consecutive slides, hold down the [Ctrl] key and then press the Copycommand.

6. From View > Switch Windows select the presentation that is to receive the pasted slides.
7. In Slide Sorter view, click where you would like to paste the slides and press [Ctrl] [V]. By default, the pasted slides will follow the destination slide's layout. (However, if you're reading this, the layout is probably not looking quite right.)
8. With the pasted slides still selected, choose Home > Slides > Layout and then choose your desired layout. This should fix most of your issues.
9. If the content of your slides is still out of whack, it is probably because the original author used separate text boxes for text. To see what is on the slides outside the standard content placeholders, view the selection pane by choosing Home > Drawing > Arrange > Selection Pane. On the selection pane, locate the formatted Content Placeholder into which you would like your text to appear. Click the eye icon next to it to hide it. Any text that is still visible once you hide the Content Placeholder may be in one or several separate text boxes. You'll fix that next.
10. Select one of the individual text boxes on the slide and copy the content (highlight the text and press [Ctrl] [C]).
11. Delete the text box.
12. On the Selection Pane, click the eye icon next to the Content Placeholder to view it again.
13. Press [Ctrl] [V] on your keyboard to paste the deleted text box's content into the placeholder.
14. Repeat steps 10-12 for any remaining text boxes on the slide. 

Once you have placed all of the text into Content Placeholders, your slides will follow your master slides' layouts.

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Having a problem getting PowerPoint to behave? Email your issue. I may be able to help and then share the solution here.