Alternatives to Reuse Slides in PowerPoint

PowerPoint is a power house of presentation and asset creation. There are shortcuts on shortcuts; there are bolt-ons and add-ins; and there are even some native features hidden like gems in sub-menus and sub-sub-menus. That is exactly what Reuse Slides was. Was because this functionality is being removed from PowerPoint from the start of next year. If you’re a big fan of Reuse Slides, fear not, we’ve got a couple of great alternatives for you to try.

What is Reuse Slides in PowerPoint?

First of all, let’s recap. Reuse Slides could be found in the ‘New Slide’ drop-down menu in the Home ribbon. Hiding at the bottom of the panel was a link to ‘Reuse Slides’. Clicking this would open up a task pane that gave you a list of recommended PowerPoint files. You could then choose one of these files, or search for more, click to see inside and select slides to add in to your current project.

What is Reuse Slides for?

This functionality is great for finding those slides that you use all the time without having to keep opening them as a separate file and copying them over. It does the hard work of helping you find the slides you need and it keeps everything in your working PowerPoint window, without having to juggle opening multiple files at once.

What will Microsoft replace it with?

As previously mentioned, Microsoft is removing Reuse Slides from 1 January 2026, and, unusually, they aren’t leaving any option to restore or re-enable the feature, even for IT admins. So what does Microsoft intend to do instead? This is a great question, and there hasn’t been word from Microsoft on a feature replacement, but we’ll offer our best guess for you using the example of the Review/Compare functionality that was taken out of PowerPoint in the Spring of 2025.

After removing the Remove/Compare feature, Microsoft instead offered a Copilot prompt in SharePoint. You can ask Copilot to compare two files and it provides you a summary of the differences between them, in text format in the Copilot task pane

If the Reuse Slides feature is going down the same route, we can expect Microsoft to suggest prompts like, ‘find me the slide that talks about financial results in the last quarter’, and Copilot will scour SharePoint, OneDrive and local libraries to find the slide you’re looking for.

Simple.

Maybe, maybe not. Copilot, though incredibly powerful for text based requests, is limited when it comes to graphical needs. We’ve tested multiple searches using Copilot for things like its suggested image functionality, and the results it provides range from good but not appropriate for the context, to the downright bizarre. Yes, as of 1 January 2026, it may be able to provide you a slide, but it may not be the slide, version of the slide, or set of numbers you’re looking for. And that means it will always need human intervention.

Given that, let’s have a look at some viable alternatives to Reuse Slides and Copilot.

Alternatives to Reuse Slides: BrandIn

Reuse Slides was a very convenient way of finding slides that you use regularly and it gave you a mechanism to add them into your PowerPoint deck without having to juggle multiple open files at once. But even then it wouldn’t always give you the most recent version, or the ‘best’ version of something. Though it had search, it wasn’t searching a library of approved content, it was just looking around the office to see what was hanging around.

The first alternative to Reuse Slides is the same in that it provides you a searchable library of slides to choose from and add to your deck without having to leave your PowerPoint workspace, but it also introduces this idea of curated content libraries. Reuse Slides allowed you to quickly find and drop in slides that you’d made before, but it didn’t discriminate on good slides, bad slides, beautifully designed slides, really ugly slides, accurate slides, inaccurate slides, old brand, new brand, and so even though it enabled users to create content quickly, there was no way to safeguard the brand or overall accuracy of that content, without the user doing their own due diligence.

Let me introduce you to BrandIn. BrandIn is an app for PowerPoint (it also works in Word), and it connects content libraries on OneDrive and/or SharePoint with your PowerPoint workspace, so you can access templates, slides, images, icons – anything in your brand kit – without having to leave the app you’re in.

But here’s where it gets interesting. BrandIn libraries aren’t just a content dump of everyone’s OneDrive, they’re curated libraries of brand-approved assets, so the content available to users is only ever going to be best practice, on-brand, accurate material.

And that’s another thing, it isn’t something that varies user-to-user, it’s a library that the whole organisation can access, which puts best practice content in the hands of all your content creators (whatever their skill level).

And if you wanted a cherry on top, BrandIn also has a Slide Updates feature where you can mark slides that need to be kept up-to-date across the whole organisation (think of a slide that uses figures that change quarterly or annually, or must be pin-point accurate for compliance reasons). If new figures are released and that slide changes, everyone who is using that slide in a presentation will get a notification that it’s been updated and they can adopt the latest version with a simple click.

If BrandIn sounds intriguing, then find out more over here.

Alternatives to Reuse Slides: Copy/paste

If you’re looking for another alternative to Reuse Slides, let me walk you through the old-fashioned way: ctrl+c/ctrl+v

Reuse Slides merely served up slides from your latest files and allowed you to access the content without having to open up a tonne of different windows to find what you were looking for. Without Reuse Slides, you can just revert back to the way things used to be.

Sigh.

Made you look. I’m not going to finish on such a disappointing note. If you want to go down this route, here are a couple of things you can try to make this method work effectively for you:

• Build a model slide library: Put together a toolkit of your best slides in one PowerPoint file. You can use in-built functionality like the section tools to separate out your slides by category or topic for faster search.
• Keep your folders tidy: If you’re relying on Microsoft’s native search, or even Copilot, you’ll reduce the margin for error if you keep the different versions you have of your slides to a minimum. If you’re in the habit of saving out your working versions, or having a different version of the same content in each presentation you make, it’s going to be hard for those search engines to pull up the right (or maybe most appropriate) version of the content. Same goes for if you save your content locally, on your OneDrive, and on SharePoint – knowing which version is the right version will be almost impossible for an AI agent.
• Share your library with your team: Once you have your toolkit built, share it with your team so that they can use it too. Yes, it might be another window they have to open and toggle between, but at least it gets good content into their hands.

There we have it, two viable options to Reuse Slides (or a potential Copilot prompt) that will help you create content using best practice, brand-approved slides, and do it all quickly and efficiently.

What will you miss about Reuse Slides? Where was it most useful for you? Let us know in the comments below.