Why are my template layouts not copying over anymore in PowerPoint?

Do you copy / paste slides in PowerPoint? To be honest most PowerPoint users do, but Microsoft have just made a tiny change with some big implications. Now, when pasting a slide into a different deck, instead of pasting the whole template with it, the default behaviour is to retain the layout only from the slide you copied.

What exactly changed?

When you paste a slide into a deck you get a small menu with three options:

• Use destination theme
• Keep source formatting
• Paste as picture

‘Keep source formatting’ would previously copy over not only the slide and its layout as is from the original deck, but also the full template it was on.

That default behaviour now copies the slide and its layout, but not the rest of the template.

Why does this matter?

Instead of having access to all the layouts in the template, you just have the one you copied. So if you wanted to switch the layout of that slide, or even make another slide using that particular template, you would be limited to the one layout you copied.

But think about the implications for a moment:

Many users don’t start from a clean template each time, instead a recognised user behaviour in PowerPoint is to make decks using the ‘last best version’. So with each new generation of a file, there are potentially more incomplete templates in circulation, watering down the brand consistency you need from your slide content.

It’s quite feasible that if you regularly juggle multiple templates – maybe for events or key products within your brand – that your deck could look something like the screenshot below. Copying between decks like this now could make it difficult to make meaningful edits, or create new slides without having to go hunting for the original files.

There’s another implication too. In an era where Copilot-generated content is on the up, and results are iffy when it comes to brand adherence, adding another step that users must follow to preserve and get the most out of their template, seems like a big risk in the drive for content consistency.

What do I do?

Thankfully, this can be easily fixed in PowerPoint within each individual user’s settings.

1. Navigate to File and Options (in the bottom right-hand corner)
2. Select the Advanced tab and open the drop-down in Cut, copy and paste

3. Select the bottom option: ‘Keep source formatting and all layouts’ – it may only be one letter, but that little ‘s’ will save you hours in fixing templates that have been broken apart through copy/pasting.

What about making this change across my organisation?

If you’re a small organisation a quick message and link to this article for your content creators will likely to the trick. If you’re in a larger organisation, I have bad news. There’s no global setting for IT admins to make this change for all users. We looked – a lot. Microsoft most likely made this change to cut down on file bloat from copying slides that sit on large templates, but it does increase the risk of template files getting split apart and broken as things get shared around further.

Here are three things you can do if you don’t want to ask several hundred content creators to update an advanced setting in PowerPoint:

• Centrally deploy your PowerPoint template to ensure everyone starts in the same place. There are a few ways to do this, but our favourite is BrandIn, our PowerPoint add-in that serves up branded assets like your PowerPoint template to users without having to go searching and risk finding the wrong version of something. Learn more about BrandIn here.
• Keep versions of your template minimal. If you want to introduce some variety, you can use the light and dark modes of your template without having to create a net new version. Learn how to do that in this short video.
• And while we’re at it, keep your template on the skinny side. We would consider best practice to be no more than 40 layouts in your template. More than that and it increases file size too much (and users don’t tend to choose anything lower down on a scroll bar).

Read more

The PowerPoint template is one of the only assets that nearly everyone in a company can go in and use, but it’s also often the asset that is most cobbled-together.

If you want to troubleshoot your template, we’ve listed a couple of articles below. If you want the template experts to do it for you, you can find out more about how we can help you here.

• Five signs your template needs updating (and how to fix it)
• How to create PowerPoint templates that work
• Templates can be tricky, if you don’t trust your own expertise to create the perfectly-programmed asset that will withstand a lot of love and attention from your enthusiastic amateur content creators, we’d be more than happy to help you out with a custom, fully-programmed PowerPoint template.