The Reuse Slides feature that has been a mainstay of PowerPoint is now retired. This applies to the PowerPoint Windows and macOS applications and was just depreciated at the beginning of this year. It will no longer be visible on the ribbon or be supported by Microsoft.
What it did
The Reuse Slides feature permitted users to import slides from other presentations without necessarily opening the file first. Accessed by navigating to Home > New Slide > Reuse Slides, this feature allowed users to view the presentations available for reuse as well as the images of the available slides. Users could then click the slides they wanted to import into their presentation. They were also given an option of applying the original presentation or the current presentation design.
Firms often resorted to Reuse Slides in the process of creating presentations, where the presentations could have common elements such as the firm’s branding. It was useful in the sense that one could quickly incorporate individual slides from the archived presentations.
Why it was removed
Microsoft says it axed the feature to streamline the PowerPoint UX by eliminating redundancy. “Reuse Slides partially duplicates other existing ways to reuse slides,” said Microsoft’s advisory (Message ID MC1179161). The company is retiring the feature as part of ongoing efforts to simplify PowerPoint and eliminate duplicated functionality.
The timing of this change has spanned much of late 2025. Microsoft started the feature’s retirement in December 2025 and removed it completely by January 2026. Now that it is removed, there is no option for admins to re‑enable it.
What’s the solution?
With Reuse Slides now gone, law firm teams will have to change their workflows for bringing existing slides into new presentations. The easiest current method is to open the source presentation alongside the target file, to select the slides you want and copy and paste them into the active deck. You can still choose to retain original formatting or apply the formatting of the destination file after pasting.
Another approach is to make use of the drag-and-drop facility available when there are open windows for PowerPoint. On computers, opening two windows for PowerPoint simultaneously makes it possible to drag slides with selected graphics from one document to another with all graphics animates.
The New Window view of PowerPoint also has something to offer here. Opening another window containing the file by clicking View > New Window, then saving the file in that new window using a different file name essentially allows you to work with a copy of your file from where you could delete or reorder your slides.
In the case of Microsoft 365 Copilot, these AI-enabled tools may help to identify relevant information and create slides. However, Copilot did not provide a replica of the specific interface that Reuse Slides offered.
One Step Further
Companies which typically reuse this standardized information for slide templates within their company and for client presentations might benefit from maintaining a slide library. They would simply store the important slides within a named template file on a SharePoint site, and users would learn to copy and drag and drop instead of using the Reuse Slides pane. Brownie points if you templatize it using the Slide Master feature.
Deletion of the Reuse Slides Function does not impact the compliance and security features, but some modifications may be needed to the company documents that were relating to the tool.
As with everything tech, it’s always a moving target of change. In this case your workflow might need to be changed up, but there is no loss of functionality.