If you’ve been using the “Reuse Slides” feature in PowerPoint, that tool quietly just got depricated. Microsoft removed it from the software for both Windows computers and Macs at the beginning of the year. Gone are the days of accessing it from the ribbon.

What Reuse Slides Did

Reuse Slides allowed users the opportunity to extract some of the slides from other presentations without having to open those presentations.

You could navigate to Home > New Slide > Reuse Slides, search for decks of your choice, view the thumbnails of the slides, and select what you wanted. You could also select whether the slides are in the original design or in your design.

This was particularly useful for teams who wanted to use the same branded slide from one presentation to another.

Why It’s Gone

Microsoft’s reasoning is rather straightforward: Reuse Slides conflicted with other ways already available within PowerPoint. They’re cleaning house, eliminating tools that were duplicated to simplify the user experience. This change rolled out between December 2025 and January 2026. Now that it’s gone, there’s no admin setting to bring it back.

What to Do Instead

Here’s how to work around it:

The most straightforward approach is to open the source deck alongside the new one. Highlight those slides you want, copy them, then paste into your active presentation. PowerPoint will still ask whether you want to keep source formatting or apply the destination theme.

You can also use ‘drag and drop’. Open two separate PowerPoint windows, line them up side-by-side and you can move slides across with animations and layout intact.

Another option is to use the New Window view under the “View” tab. You open a second window of the same file, rename it, and work on a modified copy-great to build something new without having to start from scratch.

If you’re using Microsoft 365 Copilot, it may be able to help suggest slides or draft based on content. However, it doesn’t offer a direct substitute for what Reuse Slides did visually and interactively.

Take It One Step Further

If your team tends to pull from the same old handful of slide types, consider building a shared slide library. Store it in a centralized SharePoint folder with clear naming conventions. You can make it even more usable by templatizing common slides with the Slide Master feature, keeping things consistent across the board.

Such technological shifts will go on forever. What you want to be nimble enough to adapt to without impacting your everyday activities or causing confusion in your organization is the key point here.

That’s where a good IT partner pays off for you; identifying such shifts and steering you in the right direction.