Presentations are rarely written in the right order the first time. By the end of this page you will know how to move slides around, copy a slide you want to reuse, and use two different views to manage a long deck without losing your place.
Down the left-hand side of the normal Powerpoint window is a narrow strip showing a small picture, or thumbnail, of every slide in order. This thumbnails panel is where almost all rearranging happens, because you can see the whole run of the presentation at once without opening each slide individually.
To reorder slides, click and hold on a thumbnail in that left-hand panel, drag it up or down to where you want it, and let go; a thin horizontal line shows you where it will land before you release the mouse button. To duplicate a slide, right-click its thumbnail and choose Duplicate Slide, or simply click the thumbnail once to select it and press Ctrl+D. The copy appears directly underneath the original, with all its text, pictures and formatting intact, ready for you to edit into a new slide rather than build one from nothing.
- Drag a thumbnail to move it
- Drag this one up
- 1Confirms the layout stayed the same
For a long presentation, the thumbnails panel can get fiddly to scroll through. View > Slide Sorter switches to a zoomed-out grid showing every slide as a small tile across the whole window, which makes big reshuffles, such as moving a block of six slides to the end, much easier to do by eye. If your deck has distinct parts, for example an introduction, three case studies and a conclusion, you can right-click between slides in either view and choose Add Section to label and collapse each part, so you can focus on one section at a time or move a whole section as one block.
Try it yourself
In the thumbnails panel on the left, click and drag slide 3 up to become slide 1.
This is the most direct way to reorder slides and confirms the drag-and-drop line shows you exactly where the slide will land.
Click a thumbnail once to select it, then press Ctrl+D to duplicate it.
Duplicating is much faster than building a similar slide from scratch, especially for slides that share a layout.
Edit the text on the duplicated slide so it no longer matches the original exactly.
A duplicate is only useful once it has been changed; leaving two identical slides in a deck confuses an audience.
Go to View > Slide Sorter to see every slide as a small tile.
Slide Sorter gives you the whole presentation at a glance, which makes big rearrangements far easier than scrolling.
Right-click between two slides (in either view) and choose Add Section, then type a section name.
Sections let you collapse and manage related groups of slides as a single unit in long presentations.
Return to Normal view by clicking View > Normal, or double-clicking any slide in Slide Sorter.
Normal view is where you actually edit the content of a slide, so you will switch back to it to keep working.
Words people use
Once you are comfortable dragging, duplicating and sectioning slides, restructuring a presentation stops being a chore. You can rehearse, realise the story works better in a different order, and fix it in seconds rather than rebuilding anything.
Check yourself
If you can say yes to each of these, you are ready for the next lesson.
- I can drag a slide to a new position in the thumbnails panel.
- I can duplicate a slide using Ctrl+D or the right-click menu.
- I can switch to Slide Sorter view to see and reorder the whole deck at once.
- I can group slides into a named section.