PowerPoint is one of the more user friendly Office products, and truly a pioneer in presentation technology. I have always been a fan and avid user of the product, and became even more interested with the advent of animated gifs in presentations. Now you can provide all kinds of distractions to keep your audience sentient during your presentations! 

To this end, I was more than happy to assist a co-worker with a PowerPoint problem. It was a slide transportation issue – a problem copying a slide from one presentation to another. On the surface, it appeared to be a transporter malfunction, i.e. the slide didn't look the same after the transport. However, all systems were working within their desired parameters – the change is by design. To really explain what happens when you copy a slide from one presentation to another, I must first explain the beauty of master slides.

Master slides are used to create a consistent slide base or default, so that all new slides created have the same look and feel as previous slides. There are actually 4 masters – title, slide, handout, and notes, which can be used to customize the default for those different types of slides. One of the very first things to do when you start a presentation, is setup the masters, for slide consistency. To see the masters, go to View on the Menu bar, then Master, then choose which master you want to customize. The title master applies to title slides, usually just the first slide in the presentation, but it will apply to any slide with the title slide layout. This master is good to setup particularly if you do have multiple sections to a presentation, that you segment using multiple title slides. The slide master is by far the most critical to setup, as it applies to every other slide (other than title slides) in your presentation. When you view the slide master, you will see several sections – title area, object area, date area, footer area, and number area. These sections are somewhat self-explanatory (format the date in the date section, etc.) and setup to make it easier to customize your master. You can change the font, apply a background color, or apply a pre-designed template that will take care of everything. The master is also where you would insert a graphic that you want to see on every slide, such as a company logo, or a text box with the words "STAY AWAKE," properly formatted to blend into the background and set to flash once quickly on every slide. You simply insert the picture (Insert menu...Picture, then From File or Clipart), and position exactly where you want it, and that's where you'll see it on every slide. You can also change the bullets to be happy faces – select the line of the bullet you want to change, then click on Format...Bullets and Numbering. Just about any global change you want to make can be done in the slide master. 

Now, there's a reason why I told you to setup the masters first. This is so that it can be applied to every slide thereafter. If, however, you come across a presentation made by someone who doesn't know about the masters, you will have mixed results in changing things when you customize the master. You see, the way to override the master is to make individual changes on each slide. And yes, you will probably come across people who change the colors, fonts and insert pictures on absolutely EVERY one of their 47 slides. There are some things that you change, though, that will have a global effect. The first is the template. When you change the template, even on a regular slide (not in the master), you will see that all slides will change to the template colors and graphics. However, individual fonts will not change. You can also change the color scheme or background (Format...Slide Color Scheme, or Format...Background) in the master and click the 'Apply to All' button to enforce global changes to all slides. Again, individual fonts will not be affected.  

So now that you understand all that, we can properly focus on slide transportation. When you copy a slide from Presentation A, which has Template A into Presentation B, with Template B, the slide takes on the characteristics of Template B, to INCLUDE the fonts. This was the issue for my colleague, the slide he wanted to copy was a formatted table. When he copied it into the new presentation, the fonts became the large default fonts of the template, and the table became a mess. I want to say that back in the day when I taught Office 95, the opposite happened, and the slide retained everything. Of course, a thorough search of the Microsoft Office site revealed nothing on this topic. No matter, for the most part, the change is probably what you want to happen nine times out of ten. It's easier to get the slide transported in looking the way the other slides look. However, for that tenth time, you can simply go to the slide in normal view, and change the font sizes to your liking. Or, if you are lucky enough to have PowerPoint 2002, there is a new trick called the Paste Options button, which appears near the pasted slide in Normal view. To retain the slide's original formatting, click Keep Source Formatting on the button menu.  

So now you know some of the trickier parts of PowerPoint slide formatting/copying, and I hope I have provided some small measure of comfort to those of you who thought you were going insane when you changed the master and nothing happened to the slides. Have fun creating your presentations!