How-To

How to Remove Duplicate Slides in PowerPoint

By Adam Davidson

Updated October 3, 2023

Is your presentation full of unnecessary duplicate slides? Learn how to remove duplicate slides in PowerPoint using this guide.

You’re running through a PowerPoint presentation. You press a key to move to the next slide, but the image doesn’t change. Either your keyboard has picked that exact moment to stop working, or you’ve got a duplicate slide. When you pressed the key, your presentation did move on to the next slide, but that slide was identical to the previous one.

This is just one issue that duplicate slides can cause in your PowerPoint presentations. If you have unwanted duplicates, you’re going to want to get rid of them, so you can keep your presentation as lean as possible.

Here’s how to remove duplicate slides in PowerPoint.

How to Find Duplicate Slides in PowerPoint

If you have just a few duplicate slides in your presentation, they’re fairly simple to locate. What if you have a large presentation with hundreds of slides, however? You may have combined some presentations into one and ended up with a large number of unnecessary duplicates.

Unfortunately, there’s no native way to locate duplicate slides in PowerPoint. The only option you have is to locate them manually by visual inspection. However, there are ways to speed up the process, such as selecting the best view for searching for duplicate slides and deleting multiple slides at a time.

How to View Multiple Slides in PowerPoint

Selecting the right view can make it much easier to spot duplicate slides within your presentation. The slide preview pane to the left of the screen is useful, but will only show a few slides at a time. The Slide Sorter view allows you to use more of your screen real estate to view all of your slides, so you can check through more at a time.

To view slides in Slide Sorter view in PowerPoint:

1. Open the presentation containing your slides.
2. Click the View menu.
   
3. Select Slide Sorter from the ribbon.
   
4. You will see your slides spread across the full screen.
   
5. In order to see more of your slides at once, slide the Zoom slider at the bottom of the screen to the left.
   
6. Position it so that you can fit more slides onto the screen at once, but still be able to determine which ones are duplicates.
   
7. Search through the slides and look for any duplicates that you can find.

How to Delete Slides in PowerPoint

Once you’ve found duplicate files in your PowerPoint presentation, you’ll want to delete them. You can delete a single slide at a time, or if you have found multiple duplicate slides, you can select them and delete them all at once.

To delete a single slide in PowerPoint:

1. Select the slide you want to delete.
   
2. Press Backspace or Delete.
3. Alternatively, you can right-click on the slide you want to delete and select Delete Slide.
   
4. The slide is deleted.
   

To delete multiple slides in PowerPoint:

1. Select the first slide that you want to delete.
   
2. Hold down the Ctrl key (or the Cmd key on a Mac) and keep it down as you select the other slides that you want to delete.
   
3. Once you’ve selected all the slides you want to delete, press Backspace or Delete.
4. Alternatively, right-click on one of the selected slides and click Delete Slide.
   
5. The slides will be deleted.
   

Create Better PowerPoint Presentations

Learning how to remove duplicate slides in PowerPoint allows you to get rid of any unnecessary slides that you may find in your presentation. Unfortunately, there’s no quick and easy way to do this. Your only option is to search through your slides and delete any duplicates that you find.

There are plenty of other useful PowerPoint tricks that you can learn to make your presentations even better. You can blur images in PowerPoint to make effective backgrounds that match the theme of your foreground content. You can use animations in your PowerPoint presentations to add some pop to your slides. And you can even create a flowchart in PowerPoint in just a few steps.