Before we move towards more complicated PowerPoint techniques, we need to make sure we’ve covered the basics. It’s the simple commands that save us time later and make our work in PowerPoint fast and fluent.
Today we’re discussing nice time-saving tricks that help you clone different PowerPoint objects (text boxes, charts, images, slides) and so increase your productivity. Of course, you can keep hitting Ctrl C and Ctrl V to make copies of a given shape, but you don’t want multiples copies stacked on top of each other, do you.
To avoid wasting time re-organising the objects on your slides, let us quickly show you how to duplicate objects in PowerPoint in a time-efficient way.
Option #1: The Duplicate Shortcut
This option is faster than the copy-paste method and allows you to evenly space the duplicates without having to additionally align the objects.
So, select the object you want to clone and press Ctrl D on your keyboard. Place the cloned object wherever you want it to stand on your slide. If you want to duplicate it multiple times, repeat the command and you’ll see that the rest of the duplicates will go in the same distance and direction the first duplicate went. This results in perfectly aligned rows and columns. The same can be achieved in any direction you want to go.
From here you can select the whole group of objects and duplicate the bulk.
Option #2: Hold Ctrl, click and drag
Simply select the object, press the Ctrl key so that a tiny plus (+) sign appears on the selected object. Then just drag it anywhere.
Option #3: Ctrl, Shift, click and drag
Use the above-mentioned method and add the Shift key if you want the duplicate object to be fixed in a certain position. Notice that when dragging the duplicate horizontally, it won’t move up and down and if you drag it vertically, it won’t move left or right. This way your newly created object will always be perfectly aligned. It saves you time for the more important work on your slides.
Now you know how to duplicate objects in PowerPoint and we hope you’ll start using these shortcuts now. And if you’re hungry for more time-saving hacks, why don’t you download our free shortcuts cheat-sheet. If you have any questions or would like to see a particular topic covered, do reach out to us from the comments section below.
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