Combining Multiple Powerpoint Presentations Into One Slide Deck

(Last Updated: March 16, 2017)

Sometimes in creating and editing projects, you might want to split one slide into multiple slides or merges multiple slides into one while keeping all of their objects’ effects and attributes. ActivePresenter – The best interactive eLearning authoring tool allows you to do that easily and let’s take a look at how to do that through this very brief article.

Splitting Slide

To split a slide, take following steps:

Microsoft PowerPoint allows you to combine two or more presentations with different theme templates. PowerPoint includes a Keep Source Formatting option that retains the template format for each. It’s actually very easy to do if you are using PowerPoint 2007 or newer. I’ve put together a video tutorial about how to use the “Reuse Slides” function in PowerPoint 2010 and PowerPoint 2007 to combine slides from various templates. Click Play to watch Video Tutorial. Note For Combining Several Animated Templates Together.

Step 1: Choose the Timestamp. (1)

To add another PowerPoint presentation to your existing slide deck, go to Insert – New Slide – Reuse Slides. Pick a File to Merge with Your Current PowerPoint Presentation In the sidebar that opens up, click Browse – Browse File and pick the presentation file you intend to add. Sep 01, 2020 Browse for the external presentation you’d like to insert into your main one and double-click on it. Next, you will see only the first slide of the imported presentation.

Remember that ActivePresenter will split your slide at the Playhead position, so place it at the exact timestamp that you want to split.

Step 2: Click the Split Slide icon. (2)

Your slide will automatically be split into two slides. The new one, here after called the secondary slide, is inserted right after the master slide and you can treat it as a completely new and independent one.

It contains all of the objects on the right side of the Playhead and all of their effects and attributes in the master slide maintain in the secondary slide.

You can split a slide into as many slides as you want by taking those steps again.

Merging Slides

In ActivePresenter, you can merge as many slides into one as you want.

To merge multiple slides, do as followings:

Powerpoint Slide Deck Samples

Step 1: Select slides that you want to merge. Hold Ctrl/Shift while clicking to select multiple ones.

Step 2: Right click on the SlidePane and select Merge Slides (3) from the pop-up menu.

They will be merged together along with all of their objects. After merging, you can change and edit objects just like in a normal single slide.

So now you can put this easy but powerful feature into practice to better edit your projects with ActivePresenter. Please let us know if you need more support.

Merging PowerPoint presentations can be useful in various scenarios such as combining content from multiple PPT/PPTX, merging parts of a single presentation created by two or more people, and etc. The manual way of copying/pasting the content may not be suitable when dealing with a number of presentations. Therefore, this article lets the .NET developers learn how to merge PowerPoint presentations programmatically using C#.

Combining multiple powerpoint presentations into one slide deck plans

.NET PowerPoint Merger API

Aspose.Slides for .NET is a feature-rich .NET PowerPoint API that lets you create and manipulate presentation documents. Along with that, it allows you to combine two or more PowerPoint presentations using C# or VB.NET. You can download the API’s DLL or install it using NuGet.

Merge PowerPoint Presentations using C#

In this section, you will learn how to clone and merge all the slides from one PowerPoint presentation to another. For this, you can simply clone the slides from the source presentation and add them at the end of the target presentation. The following are the steps to merge two presentations.

Create an object of Presentation class to load the target presentation file.
Create another Presentation object to load the source presentation from where you’ll clone the slides.
Access the collection of slides from source presentation using Presentation.Slides property.
Loop through the slides collection and merge them into the target presentation using Presentation.Slides.AddClone(ISlide) method.
Save the merged presentation using Presentation.Save(String, SaveFormat) method.

The following code sample shows how to merge two PowerPoint presentations using C#.

View the code on Gist.

Target Presentation

Source Presentation

Merged Presentation

Merge Particular Slides of PowerPoint Presentations using C#

In the previous example, you have merged all the slides from the source PPTX file into the target PPTX. However, there might be the case when you need to merge only the selected slides. In such a case, you can specify the slides to be merged using the slide’s index. The following are the steps to perform this operation.

Load the target presentation using the Presentation class.
Load the source presentation using the Presentation class.
Clone the desired slides using presentation1.Slides.AddClone(presentation2.Slides[int Index]) method.
Save the merged presentation as a new PPTX file.

The following code sample shows how to merge particular slides of presentations using C#.

View the code on Gist.

Merged Presentation

Use Slide Master while Merging PowerPoint Presentations

In both of the previous examples, you have merged the slides keeping the design and template of the source presentation. However, in certain cases, you may need to modify the layout of the slides in accordance with the target presentation. In such cases, you can use the overloaded presentation1.Slides.AddClone(presentation2.Slides[1], presentation1.Masters[0], true) method.

The following code sample shows how to merge the slides in PowerPoint presentation using the Slide Master in C#.

View the code on Gist.