Troubleshoot copying and pasting

A slide that you copy or insert takes on the formatting of the slides it's pasted or inserted after.

• If you pasted the slide, you can use the Paste Options button to retain your original formatting. It appears under the slide you pasted.
  1. After you copy the slide, click the Paste Options button.
  2. On the button menu, click Keep Source Formatting.

  The Paste Options button also appears when you copy shapes, tables, or text to a destination that has different styles. Use the menu on the button to select the formatting you want.

• If you copied the slide using the Slide Finder dialog box, you must select an option in the Slide Finder dialog box before you copy. Select the Keep source formatting check box and then click Insert or Insert All.

When you paste text from another application, such as Microsoft Word or the Internet Explorer browser, and choose to retain the source formatting, Microsoft PowerPoint scales the font according to the default font size of the destination presentation. For example, if you paste 12-point text from Word into a subtitle placeholder in PowerPoint whose default point size is 32, the text will size to 32. Also, if you have pasted from Word using the default font, Times New Roman, the font style is not retained when you choose to keep source formatting. However, if you paste from Word using a font other than the default, that font style is preserved.

You can preserve original font color in both of these cases, however.

The Paste Options button does not show up in the following cases:

• If you paste using Paste Special on the Edit menu. You need to use the Cut/Copy and Paste commands from the Edit menu, or copy and paste using the Office Clipboard, to get the paste options.
• If you paste a group of objects from another program, such as Word.
• If you used the Slide from Files command on the Insert menu to insert a slide. You can retain the original formatting for a copied slide if you select the Keep source formatting check box, in the Slide Finder dialog box, before you insert the copied slide.
• If there is no style discrepancy between the source and destination for the item you're pasting.

When you copy cell ranges from Microsoft Excel, you get the Paste Options button with choices to paste the Table, which pastes the data in a PowerPoint table format; paste the Excel Table (the default), which pastes the data as an Excel object; or paste the Picture of Table, which is the Excel table embedded at a slightly smaller file size. When you copy an Excel chart, you can paste it as an Excel Chart (the default) or Picture of Chart, which is the chart embedded at a smaller file size.

The Office Clipboard gives slightly different options when you paste than if you paste from the Edit menu using Paste. For example, you don't get the option to Keep Text Only when you paste from the Clipboard. (Keep Text Only allows you to match the other text in the destination placeholder as opposed to following the current design template or the source formatting.)