Table of Contents
Presentations in the classroom
Create a presentation from a template
Edit and customize your presentation
Copy and paste using the web clipboard
Import slides from another presentation
Add a theme or background image
Format, resize, or move objects on a slide
Add transitions and animations
Add text or objects to a slide
Insert a video or an image into a slide
Insert, format, and edit tables in a slide
Keyboard shortcuts in Google Slides
Preview, present or print a presentation
View or show a completed presentation
Embed a presentation in a website
Controlling discussion notifications
Streamline back-to-back presentations
Design presentation templates for meetings or classes
Overview |
With Google Slides, you can easily create, share, and edit online presentations. Here are some things you can do:
Google Drive Slides also allows you to collaborate with others to build a compelling story that captivates your audience. Creating presentations together is easy because you can:
You can also learn more in the Slides section of the Google Drive Help Center. To start using Google Slides, simply sign in with your Google Account.
Presentations in the classroom |
Developing your slide presentations online in Google Drive makes it easy to share and work concurrently on slides with others. With the ability to add drawings, images, and video, you can use presentations for a variety of projects.
Some examples of how teachers can use online presentations:
Some examples of how students can use online presentations:
Create presentations |
There are different ways of getting started using Google Slides: you can create a new online presentation, you can upload an existing one, or you can use a template from the templates gallery.
To create a new presentation, go to your Documents List, click the red Create button, and select Presentation from the drop-down menu.
As soon as you name the document or start typing, Google Drive will automatically save your work every few seconds. At the top of the document, you'll see text that indicates when your document was last saved. You can access your document at any time by opening your Documents List at http://drive.google.com.
To save a copy of a presentation to your computer, you can download it. In your document, go to the File menu and point your mouse to the Download as option. Select one of the following file types: PNG, JPEG, SVG, PPTX, PDF, or TXT. Your presentation will download to your computer.
The Google Drive template gallery has several presentation templates that you can use as a starting point for developing your slides. Each template has standard text that you can replace with your own, and preset design styles that you can reuse.
Some of the presentation templates are like themes with slides empty of written content, but filled with a custom design. Other templates have content ideas or outlines, such as a how to create a picture slideshow or create a certificate.
You can browse the template gallery to preview and select any template in two ways:
You can upload existing presentations to Google Drive at any time. When you're uploading, you can either keep your document in its original file type or convert it to Google Drive format.
Converting your document to Google Drive format allows you to edit and collaborate online from any computer.
You can upload and convert the following file types:
Follow these steps to upload a presentation:
Edit and customize your presentation |
There are four ways to insert a new, blank slide into your presentation:
By default, the new slide will have a 'Title and Body' layout. To change this layout or apply a theme, go to the Slide menu, and select 'Change Layout' or 'Change Theme.'
To duplicate an existing slide, choose from one of the following options:
To duplicate multiple slides, hold the Shift key and select the slides you'd like to duplicate. Then, right click the selection and select 'Duplicate slide.'
Copying and pasting slides is slightly different from duplicating slides because you can choose exactly where to insert the copied slide. With duplicating slides, the new slides appears directly after the original.
You can also copy and paste slides from one presentation to another.
Please note: When you copy and paste slides into a different presentation, the newly pasted slides will adopt the theme of the presentation. Some of your designs and colors may change because of varying themes.
To copy a slide in your presentation follow these steps:
In the new version of presentations, you can also use the web clipboard to copy and paste slides from one presentation to another. Here’s how:
Choose one of the following options to delete a slide:
If you accidentally delete a slide or later decide you want a slide you deleted, then you can recover it using the Revision History of the Presentation. Isn’t that awesome?
In Google Slides, you can reorder slides after you’ve created them. To start, select the slide you’d like to move. Then, press the Shift key to select a sequence of slides, or use the Ctrl key to select multiple, non-sequential slides.
Once you've selected the slide(s), choose one of these options to move it to a different place in your presentation:
The order of the slides is changed according to your selections.
Importing slides is an easy way to reuse slides from an existing presentation (if you'd like to transfer slides from the old version to the current version of Google Slides, for example).
To import slides, follow these steps:
If you receive an error message while importing a file into Google Slides, it could be for one of the following reasons:
Themes, background images, and layouts are a good way for you to customize your presentation and tailor it to a particular audience.
Themes
To change or add a theme to your presentation, go to the Slide menu, and select Change theme. Select the theme you’d like to use, and it will automatically be applied to all of the slides in your presentation.
Background images
Background images let you customize your slides using an image that’s saved to your computer. You can apply a background image to a single slide or to all of the slides in your presentation.
To insert a background image in a slide, follow these steps:
Google Slides gives you many ways to format text and objects on a slide. To get started, click the object you want to format, resize, or move.
You can also adjust the dimensions and alignment of an object. Select an object, then click the small yellow diamond in the middle. Dragging this diamond lets you edit the dimensions and proportions of the object. You can also click the circle connected to the top of the object to rotate it clockwise or counterclockwise.
Modify multiple objects at once
To select multiple objects, hold the Shift key while selecting each object or drag your mouse over all of the objects you'd like to select. To deselect one or more objects, press the Shift key and click the object(s). Multi-shape formatting only applies to objects in the new presentations editor.
You can perform the following actions on all selected objects:
Animations are helpful way to make your slides look more dynamic. They’re also a great way to reveal text or objects on a slide one step at a time. For example, you could have five bullet points of text, and reveal them one-by-one on the slide with each click.
You can also make moving from one slide to the next a little more interesting with transitions. You can add or modify slide transitions and animations in the Animations pane. Here’s how to enable the Animations pane:
The Animations pane is split into two levels. At the top, you’ll see transition options. Use the drop-down menu to select a slide transition for the selected slide.
After selecting a transition, you’ll need to set the speed of the transition
After you’ve selected the transition type and the speed of the transition, you’ll have the option to apply this transition to all slides in the presentation.
At the bottom, you can apply animations to text and objects.
Edit and format slides |
When you create a new slide, you have 6 different options for a slide layout:
Please note: You can always customize the layout of your slide by inserting images, drawings, text boxes, tables, and more. If you plan to use a more custom format, you may want to select the Blank slide template.
In Google Slides, you can draw lines, shapes and other objects directly on a slide your presentation. Go to the slide where you’d like to draw an object, and select a drawing tool from the Insert menu or from the toolbar.
To edit text or an object, click the shape. Then, you’ll see the toolbar display several formatting options for that object. If you’ve drawn a line on a slide, for example, you’ll see formatting options that include line weight, line dash, and arrowheads. Learn more about formatting text and objects on a slide.
If you’d like to change the way objects are arranged on a slide, select an object or multiple objects. Then, go to the Arrange menu and choose from the following options:
Every option in the Arrange menu is also available when right-clicking on an object.
To move and resize multiple objects at the same time, hold down the Shift key while you click each object, or drag over all of the objects you'd like to select. If an object has already been selected, holding the Shift key while clicking an object will deselect it.
Snap to grid allows you to easily auto-align text, images, shapes, and tables.
In the new and old versions of presentation, Snap to Guides is enabled by default. For the new version, you can enable or disable the Snap to Grid and Snap to Guides options under the View menu.
If you have the Snap to Guides option disabled you can also use the following keyboard commands to modify the way you work with objects on a slide:
Images
Images are a good way to make your presentations more colorful. Here are six ways to insert an image into your presentation:
Before using an image from the Internet, make sure that you have the rights to use that image. Note that there are many sites on the Internet that offer images under a Creative Commons licenses, which may be appropriate for your use. See http://search.creativecommons.org/ for more details. Inserted images must be in .PNG, .JPEG or .GIF (no animated GIFs) file formats. They can have a maximum of 2000 pixels in dimension and a maximum of 2MB in size. If images aren't appearing while viewing at school, it's likely that the images are being blocked by your school's image filter. In order to keep your Google Groups filter intact while specifically allowing ONLY the specific URL below, we can recommend a filter setting similar to the following, which may differ depending on your particular firewall and/or filtering software: |
Here’s how to insert an image in your presentation:
To move the image to another place on the slide, just drag-and-drop it. To resize the image, use the white resize handles surrounding the image.
Videos
You can add a video from YouTube into your presentation. Here’s how:
>>Browse videos on YouTube EDU
To add a table to a slide in your presentation, follow these steps:
Once your table appears on your slide, you can start editing it.
Edit a table in Google Slides
Add rows and columns
Format the table
To change the background color of a table or a cell range within a table, select a range of cells. Then, click the Fill color icon (paint bucket icon), and select a color.
You can also change cell border color and thickness for the entire table, a cell range within the table, or an individual cell. Here’s how:
Resize table, rows and columns
To resize a table, point your mouse to any of the four corners of the table. When the mouse pointer becomes an arrow, you can resize by dragging inward or outward.
Here’s how to resize an individual row or column:
Merge table cells
For additional arrangement options like centering the table within the slide, right click the table. A menu with additional options appears.
Word art lets you add flair to text and headings in a slide. Keep in mind that it’s only available in the new version of Google Slides.
Here’s how to insert word art into a slide:
You can format your word art by selecting the text box and using font, text size and color options in the toolbar. Right click the word art to edit the text, arrange it on the slide, rotate it or center it vertically or horizontally on the slide.
Tools and animations |
If you’re faster on your keyboard than your mouse, keyboard shortcuts can help you save time. With these, you can complete actions using only your keyboard. Here’s a list of actions you can do using your keyboard:
Animations are helpful way to make your slides look more dynamic. They’re also a great way to reveal text or objects on a slide one step at a time. For example, you could have five bullet points of text, and reveal them one-by-one on the slide with each click.
To place animations on a slide in the new version of Google Slides, open the Animations pane. Here are the three ways to open the Animations pane:
Here are the options available in the Animations pane:
You can add as many animations to a slide as you’d like, with one animation per shape. To add an animation to a shape, click +Add animation in the Animations pane when that shape is selected, or right click the shape and select Animate.
The list of animations in the Animations pane is displayed the order in which animations will take place on the slide. Once an animation is listed in the Animations pane, you can drag an animation up or down to change the order in which shapes appear or disappear on the screen.
To delete animations from a shape, click Delete next to that animation entry.
To test a series of animations on a slide, click the Play button.
Google Drive has a revision history pane that allows you to view at a glance all changes made to a document by each collaborator. While it may not work exactly like a track changes tool, Google Drive revision history lets you view and revert to earlier versions of your doc, and see which collaborators made edits to each of these versions.
To access revision history in Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Drawings, follow these steps:
For all Google Drive types, revisions are grouped into short time periods to make it easier for the user to identify the slight differences between previous document versions. If you want to see more fine-grained revisions, click the Show more detailed revisions button in the lower right of your document when in the Revision History pane.
Within Slides, you can go to the View menu and select a zoom level, such as 50%, 100% or 200%. Alternatively, you can use the magnifying glass icon in the toolbar to zoom in.
To zoom back out to a slide size that fits your screen, you can select the Zoom to fit icon to the left of the magnifying glass.
In the old version of Google Slides, you can zoom in and out by going to the View menu and selecting Zoom in or Zoom out.
Preview, present or print a presentation |
To print a presentation in Google Slides, follow these steps:
If you’re using a browser other than Chrome, a PDF containing your presentation will download, which you can then print from your PDF viewer. |
Print Settings and Preview
If you would like to adjust the settings for your presentation before printing, then select the Print Settings and Preview link under the File menu.
Some options available under this view include:
Speaker notes help you remember your notes and talking points while you’re presenting. To display or add these notes below each slide, go to the View menu, and select Show speaker notes. Any presentation collaborator with view access to the presentation will be able to view these notes. Any presentation collaborator with edit access to the presentation will be able to view and edit these notes.
When you’re done creating your presentation and adding speaker notes, you’ll be able to view your completed speaker notes while in presentation mode. To view your speaker notes in presentation mode, select the gear icon in the menu in the bottom left of your presentation and select Open speaker notes. Alternately, select the down arrow next to Present at the top right of the page and choose Present with speaker notes.
This opens a separate speaker notes window that allows the presenter to guide the presentation while viewing his or her notes. If you’d like to keep these notes private while you’re presenting, make sure that you project only the presentation slides.
Speaker notes show on the right hand side of the window under the slide number. You can always press the Esc key to close out of the speaker notes window and exit presentation mode.
Use the slide drop-down menu to manually move to another slide within the presentation. Use the plus and minus buttons in the upper right to zoom in and out of the speaker notes.
The timer in the bottom left of the speaker notes window to keep track of the time you’ve spent presenting, or how much time you’ve spent on a specific slide. You can pause or reset this timer by clicking the Pause and Reset buttons.
Show presentation
To show a finished presentation, select Presentation in the top right of the screen.
A new window opens, displaying your presentation one slide at a time. To skip from one slide to the next, use the arrow keys on your keyboard or click the arrow icon in the gray bar at the bottom of your presentation. To close the presentation viewer, press the Esc key.
You can also access additional presentations options in the the toolbar at the bottom of the presentation window. Here, you can select slides to present from a list, open speaker notes, print the presentation, or download it in PDF or PPTX format.
Automatically cycle through slides
You can automatically cycle through slides in presentation mode. Click the Start presentation button at the top right of your presentation. Then, click the triangular Play button.
If you embed a presentation in a website using the new version of Google Slides, you can enable time delay, autostart, and loop. Here's how:
HTML view displays your whole presentation in a single, scrollable HTML page, instead of displaying the presentation one slide at a time in the regular presentation view. This is a helpful feature if you're audience includes people who use screen readers, and you'd like to make the text more accessible to them.
To access a presentation in HTML view, go to the View menu and select HTML View. Alternatively, you can use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Alt + H (Cmd + Option + H on a Mac).
Here's how you can embed a presentation in a blog or website:
Once you've embedded a presentation, others will be able to access the code and embed this presentation on additional sites by clicking the Menu button at the bottom-right of the embedded presentation.
Comments in presentations |
Just like Docs and Sheets, collaborators on Slides are able to give feedback on a collaborative project using the discussion feature. Collaborators can comment on a shape or an entire slide to give context to the discussion.
Comments are a useful tool to gather feedback about or to collaborate on a Google presentation. Comments help you to keep track of the thoughts and edits people have for your presentation in a seamless, collaborative way.
You can leave comments for others to review, tag people in comments, respond to comments from the presentation or via email.
Comments in Google Slides
You can add a comment to a section of text, a table, or an image embedded in your Google presentation.
You can easily add others to a comment by typing '+' followed by a contact’s name or email address into a comment. For example, I would type @johndoe if my contact was johndoe@gmail.com. Your contacts will auto-populate when you start typing. Adding someone to a comment will email them a notification containing the comment thread.
NOTE: Adding someone to a comment will not add them to the sharing settings of the presentation. If you add someone to a comment who doesn’t have viewing or editing rights to the presentation, they will not receive a comment notification in their email inbox. |
You can control your discussion notifications. From the Comments drop-down menu, select Notification settings... A dialog will open, and you can select if you’d like to receive email notifications. If you opt to receive email notifications, you can also select what type of notifications you’d like to receive.
Share presentations |
Now that you've created your Google presentation, you can share it with your friends, family, or coworkers. You can do this from your Documents List or directly from the document.
Then, follow these instructions:
In the 'Sharing settings' dialog, you can also see who has access to your presentation, change the level of access people have, remove editors, commenters, and viewers, and change your document's visibility option.
Up to 10 people can edit a presentation at the same time. However, you can share a presentation with up to 200 people (whether you add collaborators or viewers, the total cannot exceed 200 people). When 10 people with edit access are viewing the spreadsheet, additional editors will have only view access. If you find you are running in to that limit, you can change the document visibility setting to allow school Apps users to have edit or view access.
Presenting your presentation |
Show presentation
To show a finished presentation, select Presentation in the top right of the screen.
A new window opens, displaying your presentation one slide at a time. To skip from one slide to the next, use the arrow keys on your keyboard or click the arrow icon in the gray bar at the bottom of your presentation. To close the presentation viewer, press the Esc key.
You can also access additional presentations options in the the toolbar at the bottom of the presentation window. Here, you can select slides to present from a list, open speaker notes, print the presentation, or download it in PDF or PPTX format.
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Navigating your slides
To skip from one slide to the next, use your keyboard's arrow keys, or click the arrow icon in the gray bar at the bottom of your presentation. You can also jump to a specific slide by clicking the the slide menu at the bottom of your presentation
Streamline back-to-back presentations |
If you arrange to have several presentations occur one right after another, it can be useful to either consolidate the presentations into a single file or to prepare the presentations before hand to simplify the switchover. Google Slides already makes it easier by not having to download documents from external media and start a separate program. The following are tips for handling multiple presentations scheduled back-to-back.
To create a master presentation, you can import slides from each of the individual presentations. To get started, just follow these steps:
Please note: When you create a master presentation with a theme, even a blank theme, any imported slides will adapt to that theme. This means if the other presentations were designed with a particular theme, those color and formatting choices will not import over. |
Another option for streamlining back-to-back presentations is to set-up a browser window with all the presentations loaded on tabs of a single browser window. You can then arrange the tabs of presentations to match the order of the schedule. You will need to make sure that all the presentations have been shared with you ahead of time.
With your browser window set-up ahead of time, you can quickly navigate to the correct tab and click the Present button for each new presentation.
Design presentation templates for meetings or classes |
If you have a specific format you like to use for meetings or class assignments, you can create a template that anyone at your school can use.
For example, if there’s a monthly faculty meeting which showcases a few best practices, you could create a standard presentation that follows the usual format. You could do the same for a class “show and tell” presentation, where some of same information being shared. Students could then copy and customize the presentation with their information.
In addition, you could use presentation templates to standardize class presentations for projects. Templates can include instructional information as well as placeholders, but those who use the template still have the ability to customize it with themes and other objects.
A template starts as a regular presentation that you can upload to your domain for anyone at your school to use.
Review the full instructions for uploading templates to your school Apps domain template gallery »