Tip of the week # 511
9 April 2017

Various ways to add a new slide to a presentation (Microsoft PowerPoint) ^*

When you open PowerPoint, a slide appears with two "placeholders" - one for a title and one for a subtitle. There are various ways to add additional slides and they might be faster than your current method.

Here's how:

1. Click on the New Slide button in the Slides group on the Home tab. OR
2. In the slide pane on the left, click where you want to add a slide and press ENTER. OR
3. Press CTRL + M.

The new slide in your presentation contains "placeholders" that you can use to build your layout, such as a bulleted list, table, charts, SmartArt graphics, pictures, movies and sound. You can select a different layout that might better accommodate the content that you plan to add to the slide by clicking on the Layout button in the Slides group on the Home tab. If you use the first option described above you can also do this "on the fly", making sure you click on the drop-down arrow, not the New Slide button itself. Any subsequent slides will automatically get the layout from the previous slide.

There are obviously other ways that you can add slides to your presentation, such as copy (CTRL + C) and paste (CTRL + V) or duplicate selected slides (CTRL + D). And you can also quickly import slides from other presentations, but let's make that the content for a future tip.

Related tips:
Tip 228: Convert your Word documents to PowerPoint presentations (tip_228.php)
Tip 268: Convert an existing bulleted list to a SmartArt graphic (tip_268.php)

^* Unless stated otherwise, these tips were written for Microsoft Office 2010.