Checking for duplicate slides is mission-critical. If a duplicate slide ends up in the final presentation, you could be embarrassed during an important presentation. Fortunately, deleting duplicate slides in a PowerPoint presentation is straightforward.
PowerPoint doesn’t have a built-in tool to delete duplicate slides. However, there are a few workarounds that can help you find and delete duplicate slides within minutes.
How to Find Duplicate Slides in PowerPoint
You probably want to create a professional presentation as quickly as possible. But since PowerPoint doesn’t offer a native feature to identify duplicate slides, you’ll have to manually skim through the presentation to search for duplicates.
While this isn’t a major problem with smaller presentations, manually scouring for duplicate slides can be time-intensive when you have hundreds of slides in your presentation.
To find duplicate slides in presentations with more slides, change the view of your presentation, so it displays multiple slides.
How to View Multiple Slides Using the Slide Sorter
You can use the Slide Sorter feature to view multiple slides at once in the following way:
- Open your PowerPoint presentation.
- Go to the View section in the ribbon and click on Slide Sorter.
- You’ll see your slides spread across your screen.
- If you have numerous slides in your presentation, zoom out from the bottom right corner by sliding the bar toward the left.
If you want to see even more slides, just zoom out. But it’s best to zoom out only to the extent that you can view the slide content and identify duplicates. When you have too many slides in your presentation, a good strategy is to find and delete duplicates in batches.
Once you’ve zoomed out to fit in as many slides on the screen as possible while being able to view slide content, select the duplicates and delete them. Then move on to the next batch and keep repeating.
How to Delete Duplicate Slides in PowerPoint
Once you’ve found the duplicate slides in your presentation, start deleting them. You can either delete duplicate slides individually or select multiple slides and delete them all at once.
Before you start deleting duplicate slides, it’s best to create a copy of your presentation just in case you end up deleting an important slide by mistake.
You can also just use the Ctrl + Z shortcut while you’re deleting slides to undelete a slide. However, Microsoft Office apps have an undo limit, so Ctrl + Z is useful but not reliable when working on important presentations.
How to Delete a Single Slide in PowerPoint
Right-click on the slide you want to delete and click Delete Slide.
You can also simply select the slide you want to delete and press Delete or Backspace.
How to Delete Multiple Slides in PowerPoint
To delete multiple slides:
- Select the slide you want to delete.
- Hold-press the Ctrl or the Cmd key and select all the duplicate slides you want to delete.
- Right-click on any of the selected slides and click Delete Slide. Or, you can press Delete or Backspace on your keyboard to delete the selected slides.
Get Rid of Duplicate Slides
Checking for and deleting duplicate slides is critical to avoiding embarrassment when you’re in the middle of an important presentation. Use the method explained above when creating a final copy of your presentation to make sure a duplicate slide doesn’t make it into the final copy.
Removing duplicates is just one of the many boxes to check when creating a professional presentation. However, there are more ways to make better presentations faster using artificial intelligence (AI). For example, did you know ChatGPT can make you a presentation from scratch within minutes?
