How to Add, Duplicate, Move, Delete or Hide Slides in PowerPoint

When working on a presentation in Microsoft PowerPoint, you will most likely perform actions such as creating new slides, changing their order, arranging them by theme, deleting unnecessary slides or even temporarily hiding slides. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to do all of this to turn any of our templates into your own presentation.

First, let’s see how to create a new slide. There are several ways to do this:

1. Select any slide and press Ctrl + M in Windows, or Cmd + M in Mac. A new slide will be created with the same design as the selected slide.
2. Right-click any slide and choose New Slide. A new slide will be created below the selected slide.

1. On the Home tab, in the Slides group, click New Slide (if you click the little arrow, you’ll also be able to choose the design for this new slide).

Creating a new slide might not always be the best option for you. You might want to keep a certain clipped image or part of a text from a previous slide in a new one. In this case, it’s best if you duplicate a slide.

To duplicate a slide, select it, right-click and choose Duplicate Slide.

You might also need to delete a slide from your presentation because you do no longer want it. 

To delete a slide, select it, right-click and choose Delete Slide. You can also select it and just press the Delete or Backspace key. Remember that you can select multiple slides by holding the Ctrl key (Cmd in Mac) while clicking them. This might be useful if you want to remove several slides at the same time.

You can also re-arrange the slides, that is, moving them from one position to another. To do that, select the ones you want to move and drag them to the desired position. As mentioned before, to select multiple slides, hold the Ctrl key (Cmd in Mac) while clicking them.

Here’s one more thing: if you don’t want a certain slide to show up during your presentation, you don’t need to create a new file with the same presentation without that slide. You have the option of hiding it.

To do this, select the slide or slides that you want to hide, right-click and choose Hide Slide. They will no longer be visible in your presentation. Any hidden slide will have its number crossed out, so you can identify them easily.

We’ve reached the end of the tutorial. If you want to keep learning about PowerPoint, stay tuned for more Slidesgo School content. We also have tutorials on how to work with presentations in Google Slides, so check them out too. Learn with us and use our templates to create awesome presentations!