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My company offers a PowerPoint template for business presentations that contains multiple slide masters (with multiple layouts). They recently updated this template. Now I need to update my existing presentations that still use an older version of that template.

What I tried:

  • I created a new presentation from the new template. I then copied all slides from my old presentation into that new presentation.

    Result: All slides changed their layouts to the corresponding layout of the first slide master (in the list of all slide masters) instead of keeping their slide master with the same name.

  • I opened my old presentation. I copied all new slide masters from the template into the old presentation and then removed all old slide masters from it.

    Result: Again, all slides changed their layouts to the corresponding layout of the first slide master (in the list of all slide masters) instead of keeping their slide master with the same name.

With my last try I effectively replaced the existing slide masters, but technically it was a copy and remove operation. So that's probably why the slides lost their reference to the correct slide masters.

Is their a way to technically replace a slide master, so that its new layout(s) apply to existing slides?

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  • Have you opened the master slides of the old presentation and directly editing them? That is, removed the objects within the existing master slide and then creating the new layout within the same master slide. That is, do not ever delete the master slides. You can probably copy the objects from within the new master slide and paste them into the existing old master slide without deleting the slide itself.. Unless I misunderstood what you, you haven't tried this.
    – Brian
    Commented Jul 19, 2023 at 15:29
  • I do not want to repeat the work that someone else already did, when updating the template. In other words, I do not want to apply every change (he/she did to the slide masters of the old template) to the slide masters of my presentation manually. This just does not scale well. I am looking for a way to take the new slide masters (with all their changes at once) and apply them to my old slides without knowing all the detailed changes.
    – stackprotector
    Commented Jul 19, 2023 at 15:43
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    Hopefully I'm wrong but I don't see any other way. "Normal" slides are linked to their respective master slide and only change when that slide changes. And I don't see how copying the objects in a new master slide and pasting them onto an old master slide is repeating the work. The purpose of the master slide is that all "normal" slides that are linked to it so that you do not need to be individually changed should there be a change to the template; only the template (i.e. master slide) needs to be edited.
    – Brian
    Commented Jul 19, 2023 at 15:50

1 Answer 1

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Currently, there does not seem to be a way to apply a newer version of a slide master conveniently. So you have to do it the hard way:

  1. Copy and paste the new slide masters into your existing presentation.

  2. Change every single slide to use a layout of the new slide masters.

  3. Remove the old slide masters.

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