Managing Slide Shows
PowerPoint has several useful tools and techniques you can use to manage presentations. If you work in Slide Sorter view, it's easy to copy, move, insert, or delete slides. But there are some tricks. To paste a slide at the beginning of a presentation, go into Slide Sorter view and click to the left of the first slide, and then paste.
If you want to copy slides from one presentation and put them in another, select the slide you want the imported slides to appear after (in Slide Sorter view, click between the slides), and then choose Insert, Slides from Files. The Slide Finder dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 28.12.
Figure 28.12. Slide Finder lets you pick and choose which slides to copy into the current presentation.
Find the file containing the slides you want to copy, and then click the Display button. Click each slide in turn and click Insert.
Note
The Slide Finder's List of Favorites tab is maintained independently of Windows'(and Office's) Favorites folder.
Caution
When you bring a slide into a presentation via the Slide Finder, and you have the Match Destination Formatting box checked, PowerPoint modifies each slide to take on the design of the current presentation. That certainly changes the background of the imported slides; it might also change fonts, bullets, and much more, and imported hyperlinks might not behave as expected.
Check immediately after importing slides in this manner to make sure that the imported slides hold no surprises.
PowerPoint lets you mark specific slides as hidden. Hidden slides appear in all views except Slide Show view and they don't show up when the presentation is run.
To hide a slide, go into Slide Sorter view, select the slide to be hidden, and click the Hide Slide icon. You'll know that the slide won't be shown in the presentation because a "not" sign appears over the slide number.
Caution
You can hide slides while working in other views—select the slide, and then choose Slide Show, Hide Slide. When you use this technique, Normal View will show the slide number with a slash through it. That tells you the slide is hidden.
When you add a new slide to a presentation, you must specify what kind of slide you want (unless you paste one in). To specify the type of new slide, choose a thumbnail sketch from the Slide Layout pane (refer to Figure 28.6).
→ For tips on getting the slide layout right, see "Picking the Best Slide Layout".
If you deliver PowerPoint presentations regularly, you might have a main presentation that needs only a bit of tweaking for use with a variety of audiences. For example, you might have one version for executives and a slightly different version for technical professionals. PowerPoint makes it easy to keep all your slides together in one file, but build separate, custom slide shows for specific audiences.
To create a custom show, choose Slide Show, Custom Shows, New. The Define Custom Show dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 28.13.
Select the slides you want to appear in the custom show and click Add. Note that you can move a slide—so it appears in a different sequence in the custom show—by clicking the up arrow or down arrow. Type in a name for the custom show, and click OK.
To preview a custom show, click the name of the show and click Show.
Move to the slide in your presentation where you want to branch out to one of these custom shows. Select a location for the link (perhaps in the body text, or in a drawing), and click the Hyperlink icon. In Link To, pick Existing File or Web Page. Type the text you want to have displayed on the slide, and click Bookmark, as shown in Figure 28.14. The Select Place in Document dialog box appears.
Figure 28.14. Hyperlink to one of the custom shows—for example, Executive Briefing.
Choose the custom show you want to link to, and click OK. From that point on, whenever you encounter the slide with the hyperlink, click it to display the custom show.
Note that there is no automatic facility to "return to the main presentation" after a custom show is over. For that reason, you might find it easiest to put all the remaining slides in a presentation in your custom show.
Tip from 
Alternatively, you can create a hyperlink on the last slide in the custom show to take you back to whatever point in the main presentation you like.
→ For details about hyperlinking inside your presentation, see "Using Hyperlinks".
You can tell PowerPoint that you want it to run a custom show, instead of the "normal" show, whenever you start a slide show. To do so, choose Slide Show, Set Up Show and the Set Up Show dialog box appears (see Figure 28.15). Select the custom show you like in the Custom Show box in the Show Slides area.
Figure 28.15. Have PowerPoint run a custom show automatically by using the Custom Show setting.
Custom shows can be a powerful feature. For example, you can put all your slides relating to a given topic inside one PowerPoint file, and then pick and choose the slides you want to give for your main presentation. Set up a custom show called Main, and then choose Main as the default show in the dialog box shown in Figure 28.15. That way, all your slides stay in one .ppt file, the Main presentation runs whenever you start a slide show, and you can easily and quickly add and remove slides from the Main presentation.