Google Workspace: Slides

Slides is Google’s answer to Microsoft PowerPoint, in your web browser or app. It is an online, collaborative presentation program that is part of Google Drive and Google Workspace. As long as you are connected to the internet, all your changes are saved instantly.

You can access Slides by going to slides.google.com or you will see your Slides files in your Drive.

Create a new document

You can create a new document from either Google Drive or from Google Slides.

In Drive, you can click the + New button in the top left corner.

In Slides, you’ll be given a few templates and a Blank option to start from, click Template gallery to find more options including some Barton Peveril branded templates.

Alternatively as we learned in The Basics, you can just type in slides.new in to your browser.

The Toolbar

The main toolbar along the top of a Slides window houses some key features that you probably won’t use each time but it’s extremely useful to know about. It also tells you when things are saved. Each time you click out of a cell after editing it or make other key changes, the All changes saved in Drive text will change to Saving… as you can see below.

We’ll go through some of the toolbar menus now, others you can discover on your own.

Files

Make a copy… – Make a duplicate of the document you are in.

Import slides… – Import slides from a different Slides doc or PowerPoint document.

Download as – Download your document in other formats, such as PowerPoint, Image files or PDF.

Version History – See all the changes you and others have made to the document or revert it to earlier documents.

View

Present – Begin the presentation. This button is also at the top right of the Slides screen.

Master – Edit the theme on the Master slide to apply that theme to all slides.

Grid view – View all your slides as a grid, you can move them around easily.

Insert

Chart – Create a graph based on the data in your spreadsheet.

Table – Create and add a table.

Diagram – Create and add in a flowchart.

Slide numbers – Add slide numbers to each slide.

New slide – Add a blank slide before the currently selected slide.

Slide

Duplicate slide – Duplicate the currently selected slide.

Skip slide – Hide this slide from the main presentation, it will still remain available for you to edit.

Formatting Toolbar

Slides has a lot of the same features as PowerPoint, it just doesn’t have all the same animations or slide transitions but it does allow for much greater collaboration.

The image below shows the main editing features of Slides, there are quick buttons for adding in new text boxes, images, shapes, lines and links as well as setting borders of content too.

If you need extra settings that aren’t here, click on the Format button along the main toolbar for other settings such as Strike-through or capitalisation.

Embed a timer

In some lessons, you might want to let the conversation flow but others you might want to set a time limit on discussions. You might want to give the students 5 minutes to do a specific piece of work but sometimes get distracted and lose track of the time. You can easily embed a timer straight into your Google Slides presentation to help manage class time better.

It’s not exactly a function of Slides but fortunately, there’s a hack for that!

In your Slide, click Insert then Video and search for a YouTube video titled “X minute timer” where X is the amount of time. Select the video and adjust it to size. Have it fill half the page or a small portion of the page. Just press play on the video when you are presenting.

Masking / Shaping an Image

You can change the shape of an image in Slides, this can help if you don’t want a solid square image and want to make it look a little nicer as a circle or rounded edged square. You can turn an image into an arrow, star or callout.

Simply select the image you want to change, then click the little arrow next to the Crop icon and select the desired shape.

Video Trimming

If you’ve ever wanted to show students a section of a YouTube video and have to skip along trying to find the exact moment you need or stop it quickly before it starts the next section then this is for you.

Google Slides has a neat feature that allows you to insert just part of a YouTube video, you can insert just the 2 minutes you want them to watch or cut off the first 10 minutes so they are just left with the exact information you want them to know.

It’s really simple to achieve, all you need to do is to work out the exact start and end time of what you want to show. If you want to show a specific amount of time from the beginning or the end then it’s even easier.

Grid View

This is a tool that is extremely useful, especially if you have Slides presentations with lots of slides.

In the bottom left corner of a Slides window, you will see these two icons, the darker colour represents what view you are looking at. The standard default option is called Filmstrip View and is the view you get as default when you open a Slides doc. The other option is called Grid View and lets you view all your slides, you just can’t edit them in this view.

When Grid View is selected you see the slides in the document as a grid, from here you can check that your slides are in the correct order and if not simply click and drag a slide to where you want it to be.

Explore

A relatively new feature in Docs, Sheets and Slides, the explore button will provide different options in each app.

In Slides it will scan through your presentation and suggest alternative layouts for your content. You can also use the search feature at the top of the Explore tab to search for webpages or images from the web or content from your Drive.

You can find the Explore icon in the bottom right corner of a Slides window, once you click it you will have all of Google’s suggestions and content at your fingertips.

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