Merge PowerPoint

1. 1

   Add your presentations

   Drop in two or more .pptx, .pptm, .ppsx, .ppsm, .potx or .potm files. Each one is read on your device and its slides are listed with their titles.

2. 2

   Choose a formatting policy

   Keep source formatting brings every deck's own theme, layouts and masters across. Use the first deck's theme re-themes every slide onto your house design instead.

3. 3

   Arrange slides and decks

   Reorder files with the arrows, or open a deck to include only the slides you want. Untick a slide to leave it out.

4. 4

   Set the output slide size

   If your decks are different shapes, pick which size wins and whether content should be scaled to fit the new canvas.

5. 5

   Merge and download

   Press Merge. The combined deck is assembled on your device and downloads as one file.

Combine two or more presentations into one deck, in the order you choose, without anything leaving your device. Each deck keeps its own theme, layouts and slide master unless you ask for the opposite, speaker notes travel with the slides they belong to, and you can take individual slides out of a file rather than all of it. The tool accepts six PowerPoint formats, reconciles decks that are different shapes, and stores an image that appears in several decks once instead of once per deck.

• Keep every deck's formatting: each source presentation's theme, slide layouts, slide master, colours, fonts and backgrounds come across with its slides.
• Or re-theme in one move: switch the policy and every imported slide is mapped onto the matching layout of your first deck.
• Pick individual slides: open any file and untick the slides you do not want. Nothing else is affected.
• Reorder decks and slides: arrows move a whole file; the slide list controls what comes out of it.
• Speaker notes, kept or dropped: notes stay attached to the right slides, or come off in one switch for a client copy.
• Charts, SmartArt and media: embedded chart data, diagram parts, tables, video, audio and embedded fonts all travel with the slide that uses them.
• Six formats in: .pptx, .pptm, .ppsx, .ppsm, .potx and .potm, including macro-enabled decks.
• Mixed slide sizes reconciled: choose which size wins, and scale content proportionally onto the new canvas.
• Nothing uploaded: every file is opened, combined and saved on your device.

A PowerPoint slide does not carry its own appearance. Its placeholders take their position, size, typeface, colour and background from the layout the slide was built on; that layout inherits from a slide master; and the master resolves every colour and font through a theme. Copy the slide on its own and you have copied a set of shapes that no longer know what they should look like.

That is why the default policy imports each source deck's entire design chain — theme, master and every layout on it — and lets the merged presentation carry several masters at once. It is exactly what PowerPoint does when you use Reuse Slides with Keep source formatting, and it is the difference between a merged deck that looks like the decks you started with and one that looks almost right in a way you cannot quite name.

• Themes: every source deck's colour scheme and font scheme, kept whole. Merging three decks gives you three themes, selectable per slide in PowerPoint afterwards.
• Slide masters and layouts: the whole master comes across, not just the one layout a slide happened to use, so the Slide Master pane still makes sense.
• Speaker notes: each notes page is carried with its slide, and the merged deck keeps the single notes master the format allows.
• Charts: the chart part and the workbook embedded behind it, so the chart is still editable.
• SmartArt: the four diagram parts a piece of SmartArt needs, which is where most merge tools drop a reference and break the file.
• Embedded fonts: a deck that embedded its typefaces keeps them, so it renders the same on a machine that does not have them installed.
• Links: web links are untouched. A link to another slide is repointed to that slide's new position, or quietly disarmed if you chose not to include it.
• Macros: if any deck is macro-enabled the project is carried and the output is a .pptm, rather than macros being dropped without saying so.

There are only two honest answers to what a merged deck should look like, and which one you want depends on the job. The tool offers both and neither costs anything.

Keep source formatting (default)

Every slide arrives looking exactly as it did in the deck it came from. Use this when the decks come from different people, different clients or different brands, and each section is meant to keep its own identity — a conference pack, a portfolio of case studies, a handover bundle. The merged file ends up with more than one slide master, which is normal and is what PowerPoint itself produces.

Use the first deck's theme

Every imported slide is re-themed onto your first deck's design. Slides are not dumped onto one layout: a title slide is mapped to the destination's title layout, a two-content slide to its two-content layout, and a custom layout is matched by name where the same one exists in both decks. Use this when the decks are yours and the point of merging is to make them look like one thing.

Most merge tools work on whole files, and every one of the major online ones tells you to open PowerPoint if you want anything finer. Here each file in the list expands into its slides, with the title read from the slide's own title placeholder, and each slide has a tick box. Untick what you do not need and only the rest is merged. The deck's position in the list still decides where its slides land, so you can build a deck out of pieces — slides one and two of the intro, slides three to seven of the quarterly review, the closing slide of last year's pack — in a single pass.

Leaving a slide out is handled properly rather than just skipped. If a slide you kept had a link pointing at a slide you dropped, the link is disarmed instead of being left pointing at nothing, and a custom slide show that referenced the dropped slide is trimmed rather than broken.

A presentation stores one slide size for all of its slides. Merge a 4:3 deck into a 16:9 one and something has to give — there is no version of the file format where both survive untouched. Most tools ignore this and simply write one size over the other, which leaves 4:3 content sitting in the top-left corner of a wide canvas with a band of empty space down the side, or pushes 16:9 content off the edge of a narrow one where it cannot be seen or printed.

Choose which size wins: the first deck's, the largest width and height found across all of them, or the size of one specific file. Then leave Scale content to fit switched on and any slide whose deck was a different shape is scaled by a single proportional factor and centred on the new canvas. Proportional rather than per-axis, so circles stay circles and logos keep their shape; centred rather than pinned to the corner, because a slide's composition is built around its canvas. Text, line weights and paragraph spacing scale with the geometry, so a downscaled slide reads the way it was designed to.

Six formats go in and one comes out. All six are the same kind of package inside — the extensions differ by whether the file opens for editing or straight into a slideshow, whether it is a template, and whether it carries macros.

• .pptx — the standard PowerPoint presentation.
• .pptm — a macro-enabled presentation. The macro project is carried and the merged file is saved as .pptm.
• .ppsx — a PowerPoint show, which opens directly into presentation mode.
• .ppsm — a macro-enabled show.
• .potx — a PowerPoint template.
• .potm — a macro-enabled template.

Anything else is refused at the file picker, by name, with somewhere to go next:

• Older .ppt, .pps and .pot — these are the pre-2007 binary formats, not PowerPoint packages at all. Open one in PowerPoint and use Save As to make a .pptx.
• OpenDocument .odp and .otp — LibreOffice and Google Slides can export these as .pptx, which this tool then reads normally.
• Keynote .key — export from Keynote as PowerPoint first.
• A Word or Excel file — these are packaged the same way as a presentation, so a renamed one looks convincing until it is opened. It is named for what it is, with a link to the Word or Excel merger.
• An empty or damaged file — reported as such rather than failing part-way through a merge.

A presentation is a package of parts. Most of those parts — images, video, embedded chart workbooks, fonts — are already compressed, and most of them do not change at all when two decks become one. The merger recognises that and copies them across in the form they are already in, rather than unpacking and repacking every one. Only a handful of small description files per deck are actually rewritten.

The second saving is duplicate images. A logo or a cover photo that appears in several of the decks you are merging is stored once, matched by its actual content rather than its filename. On a five-deck test totalling 46.6 MB with 120 slides, the merged deck came out at 21.9 MB in about 0.16 seconds, and the page kept responding throughout because the work happens away from the interface.

• Nothing re-encoded: images and video keep their exact original bytes, so merging never costs quality.
• Duplicates stored once: identical media shared between decks is written a single time.
• Off the interface: the merge runs in the background, with progress and a working Cancel.
• No upload wait: there is no round trip, so a 40 MB deck starts instantly instead of after an upload.

Five decks totalling 46.6 MB and 120 slides merge in about 0.16 seconds on a desktop machine, without the page ever stopping.

The repair message PowerPoint shows when it opens a damaged file almost always means the same thing: something in the file refers to a part that is not there. A merge is unusually good at producing that, because every slide points at several other pieces and every one of those pieces moves.

• Every referenced part travels: layouts, masters, themes, notes pages, charts, diagrams, embedded objects, images, audio and video are followed from each slide and brought across.
• Every reference is rewritten: when a part lands under a new name, everything that pointed at it is updated to match.
• Every file type is declared: a package has to declare the type of every part it holds, and a merge that brings in a GIF from the second deck when the first had only PNGs has to say so.
• Identifiers are reallocated: slides and masters are numbered from ranges the format reserves, and two decks that both used the same number no longer collide.
• One notes master: the format allows exactly one, so notes pages from every deck are pointed at the one that is kept.
• Properties rebuilt: the merged deck reports its own slide count and its own slide titles, not the first deck's.
• Checked before you get it: the assembled package is walked from its root and every reference verified before the download is offered.

Merging decks is nearly always the last step before something is sent. A consultant assembles a client pack out of a standing introduction, a bespoke findings section and a fixed set of terms. A conference organiser collects a slide or two from every speaker and needs each one to keep its own branding. A trainer stitches four modules into one course file. A team lead builds a quarterly review from the sections each function wrote separately.

What those jobs have in common is that the decks came from different places and were not designed together. That is exactly the case where a merge that quietly re-themes everything onto the first file's design does the most damage — the deck opens, nothing looks broken, and a client's slides are suddenly in someone else's colours. It is also the case where losing speaker notes matters most, because the person presenting is often not the person who wrote them.

• Put the deck whose design you want to lead first in the list — it decides the default slide size and, under the re-theming policy, the design everything else adopts.
• If your decks are different shapes, choose the size before you look at anything else; it changes how every slide from the other decks is laid out.
• Leave Scale content to fit on when sizes differ. Turning it off keeps the original geometry, which is what you want only if you plan to reposition slides yourself.
• Use slide selection instead of merging and then deleting. Deleting afterwards leaves the unused deck's layouts and images in the file.
• Drop speaker notes when you send a deck outside your organisation — notes are often the most candid text in a presentation.
• Check the merged slide count in the summary before downloading; it is the quickest way to notice that a slide was left unticked.
• Merging a macro-enabled deck produces a .pptm. Keep the extension when you save it, or the macros will not run.

• Split PowerPoint
• Change Slide Size
• Images to PowerPoint
• Add Watermark to PowerPoint
• Compress PowerPoint
• Extract Text from PowerPoint