Google Slides cheat sheet

Create or open a presentation

You can create a new presentation, or load one you’ve already saved in Google Drive, through the Google Slides home page or the Google Drive home page. You’ll need to sign in to your Google or G Suite account if you haven’t already.

In Google Slides: At the top of the home page you’ll see a “Start a new presentation” header, with a row of thumbnails underneath. Below that you’ll see a list of Google Slides presentations you have stored in Google Drive or that are stored in someone else’s Drive and shared with you.

To open a presentation stored in Drive, click it in the list below.

By default, the presentations list appears in reverse chronological order starting with the presentation you most recently opened. Clicking the “AZ” icon at the upper right of this list to change the sort order to “Last modified by me,” “Last modified” (by anyone with access to the presentation), or in alphabetical order by presentation title. You can also browse to a specific folder by clicking the folder icon next to the AZ icon.

Use the search box at the very top of the screen to search on a word or phrase; if it appears in a presentation title or the body of a presentation, it’ll appear in the search results.

In Google Drive: To start a new blank presentation, click the New button at the upper-left of the screen and then click “Google Slides.”

If you want to select a template to start a new presentation, click the New button, then move the cursor over the “>” to the right of “Google Slides” and select “From a template.” Google Slides will open, showing its full template gallery; click a thumbnail to start a new presentation in that template.

Creating a new presentation in Google DriveYour presentations that are already stored in Google Drive are listed in the main area of the Drive home page under “My Drive.” Double-click the one you want to view or edit, and it will open in Google Slides.

To open a presentation that someone else has shared with you via Google Drive, click “Shared with me” in the left column, then double-click the presentation you want in the main listing area.

Alternatively, use the Search box at the very top of the screen to search for a word or phrase that appears in any presentation you have access to in Drive, whether you own it or it’s been shared with you.

Upload a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation for editing in Google Slides

If you want to edit a presentation that’s not already stored in your Google Drive, you must first upload it to Drive. You can do this from either Slides or Drive, but somewhat different things might happen with each approach.

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From Google Slides: To upload a file from the Slides home page, click the folder icon above the presentations list, then click the Upload tab on the screen that appears. You can drag and drop a file onto the screen, or browse your computer’s hard drive and select a file.

If you upload a Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt or .pptx) presentation, it’s automatically converted so that you can edit it in Google Slides. It appears listed on your Google Slides and Google Drive home pages.

From Google Drive: To upload a presentation via the Google Drive home page, click the New button, then “File upload,” and select the presentation from your PC’s drive.

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Depending on how Google Drive is configured, Microsoft PowerPoint files may or may not be converted to Slides format. Click the gear icon in the upper-right corner of the Drive home page and select Settings from the drop-down menu. In the Settings box next to “Convert uploads” you’ll see a checkbox marked “Convert uploaded files to Google Docs editor format.” Check it if you want PowerPoint files to be automatically converted to Slides for editing, and uncheck it if you don’t.

Why wouldn’t you want to convert files to Slides format when you upload them? Google announced a new feature at its Cloud Next conference in April: the ability to edit Microsoft Office-formatted files in Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides without converting them first. The idea is to make it easier for users whose colleagues use Office. Instead of converting a file to Slides format and then back to PowerPoint format to send back to an Office-using colleague, Slides users can edit and collaborate on a native PowerPoint presentation right in Slides, with all changes made by you or your collaborators saved directly to the PowerPoint file.

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If you choose to upload PowerPoint files in their native format, they appear listed on your Google Slides home page and Google Drive home page with a PowerPoint icon next to them instead of the usual Slides icon.

When you double-click a PowerPoint file on the Drive home page, it opens in read-only mode. To edit it, click the “Open with Google Slides” button at the top of the page; the file opens in a new Google Slides browser tab. To open a PowerPoint presentation from the Slides home page, click it in the presentations list and choose “Edit in Google Slides.” To the right of the document’s title you’ll see a yellow .PPTX label. Any changes you make are saved in this original PowerPoint-formatted file.

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Work on a presentation

Whether you open a new or existing presentation, its first slide appears in the main window of Google Slides. The formatting toolbar above it has buttons for inserting design elements onto it, such as text, images, shapes and lines. Other buttons on the toolbar let you add a comment to the slide; change its background, layout, or the design theme of the entire presentation; and add or change the animated transition effect that introduces this slide when the presentation is played.

 

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The menu bar toward the top of the screen contains the same tools that are on the formatting toolbar — and many more. Under the Insert menu are commands for inserting a table, chart, diagram or link to a YouTube video or a video file that you’ve stored on your Google Drive. Using the Slide menu, you take actions to manage your slides, such as copying, deleting or rearranging their order in the slideshow sequence. The Arrange menu helps you manipulate graphical elements on a slide when you are designing it.

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Your presentation’s title appears at the top-left of the screen, above the menu bar. To change it, click the title — you can highlight the words and edit them. There’s no need to “Save as” under a different title. In fact, there’s no need to save at all; Slides automatically saves any changes you make to your presentation as soon as you make them.

The slides in your presentation appear as thumbnails in a pane to the left of the screen. Click a thumbnail, and the slide it represents appears in the main viewing window, where you can edit it.

When you start a new presentation by clicking Blank, a Themes sidebar pane opens on the right side, with thumbnails for different themes that the presentation can be changed to.

You can add brief “speaker notes” in the “Click to add speaker notes” area along the bottom of each slide. These words are shown only to you when your presentation is being played to your audience. You may want to add notes here to remind yourself what to do or say when the slide is being shown.

Change slide layouts and transitions

Two elements about slide presentation design that you should know how to access from the Google Sheets menu bar: the master layout and animated transition effect for a slide.

View or edit a slide layout: To view the layout of a slide, click to select the slide in the thumbnail toolbar and click View > Master. To edit the layout, select Slide > Edit master. Both actions replace the main window where your selected slide is shown with a dark-themed mode where you can view or edit its master layout.

 

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View or edit a slide transition: To view the animated transition effect that brings in the slide when your presentation is played, click to select the slide in the thumbnail toolbar and click View > Animations. To edit the transition, select Slide > Change transition. Both actions bring in a Transitions tool pane along the right side of the screen, where you can choose from a variety of transition styles.

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Manage the slides in a presentation

To add a new, blank slide to your presentation, click the “+” button at the left end of the formatting toolbar. Alternatively, if you click the down arrow by the “+”, you can choose a layout to use as the basis for a new slide.

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To move a slide to a different spot in the slideshow sequence, click and hold its thumbnail in the left pane, drag it up or down to another place in the sequence, and release it.

To delete a slide, right-click its thumbnail on the sidebar and select “Delete” from the pop-up menu. Alternatively, select its thumbnail and select Edit > Delete from the menu bar or just press the Delete key.

Get suggested layouts and content for a slide with the Explore tool

In the lower-right corner of your screen is the Explore icon. It’s usually colored gray. But if you click in a slide in the main viewing window or on a thumbnail in the left pane and the Explore icon turns orange, it means Google Slides has a suggestion to help you with the slide’s layout.

Click the Explore icon, and a panel opens showing a variety of layout designs you can use for the slide. To select a suggested layout, just click it, and your text and images on the slide will transfer over to the new layout. (If the Explore icon is gray, you can still click it; that forces Slides to check if it has any layout suggestions for the selected slide.)

 

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You can also use the Explore tool to find content for the slide. At the top of the Explore pane is a search box; type in a word or phrase, and the tool will search the web for related content. Click the Images tab in the Explore pane to see thumbnails for images related to your search term or the Drive tab to search your own Google Drive files as well as files others have shared with you in Google Drive.

Clicking a web or Drive result opens it in a new browser tab. Clicking the plus sign for an image thumbnail inserts it into your slide, while clicking the thumbnail itself enlarges it so you can see it better and decide whether to use it.

For more information, refer to Google’s help page “See and use suggested layouts in a presentation.”

Recover older versions of a presentation

When you have a presentation open, you can look at older versions of it that were saved automatically by Google Slides and revert the presentation to one of those earlier versions. This can be useful for repairing editing mistakes made by you or others on a shared file.

Click File > Version history > See version history. This opens a panel on the right that shows a list of older versions of the presentation, organized by date and time.

 

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To give an older version a unique name, click on its date. You’ll be prompted to type in words to replace the date. The date and time will then appear in smaller type underneath the new name.

To see what an earlier version of the presentation looks like, click its date or version name in the list on the right. That version of the presentation appears in the main window.

To restore that version so it replaces the current one, click the yellow “Restore this version” button at the upper-left of the screen. The restored version appears at the top of the version history list, and the version you were looking at prior to restoring the earlier one becomes the second item in the list.

Share and collaborate on a presentation

Presentations are often a group effort, with several team members contributing to and polishing a presentation. In Slides, it’s easy for multiple collaborators to work on a presentation together. From the Slides screen where you’re editing your presentation, click the yellow Share button at the upper-right. A “Share with others” screen appears over the presentation.

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To share the presentation privately: Enter the email addresses (or names of your Google Contacts) of the people with whom you want to share in the entry box. By default, people you invite to the presentation can edit it and share it with others.

To set it so that people you invite can add comments to your presentation but not edit it, click the pencil icon to the right of the box and choose “Can comment.” Or, to allow them to view your presentation but not edit it or add comments, click the pencil icon and choose “Can view.”

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To prevent collaborators from sharing the spreadsheet with others, click “Advanced” at the bottom of the “Share with others” panel. This expands the panel, revealing all the settings for sharing your presentation. Check the box marked “Prevent editors from changing access and adding new people.” (The checkbox below it lets you prevent those with comment and view permissions from downloading, printing, or copying the spreadsheet.)

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G Suite and Drive Enterprise subscribers can also set an expiration date for a shared presentation in the advanced “Sharing settings” pane. After this date passes, the person or people you’ve shared the presentation with will no longer be able to view it. To do this, hover your cursor over a collaborator’s name, and a stopwatch icon appears. Click it, then click the drop-down next to “Access expires” to set the person’s access to expire in 7 days, 30 days, or on a date you select. Expiration dates cannot be set for collaborators with edit access, only comment or view access.

To share the presentation publicly: On the “Share with others” screen, click the chain icon by “Get shareable link.” A panel opens, showing you a web link that you can share with other people (and that they can share with others). Anyone who has the link can access your presentation, so think carefully before choosing this option. For business purposes, it’s probably better to invite specific people privately.

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By default, anyone with the sharing link can only view your presentation. To allow anyone to comment on or edit your presentation, click “Anyone with the link can view” and select “Anyone with the link can edit” or “Anyone with the link can comment” from the drop-down menu. To turn the sharing link off, select “OFF – only specific people can access” from the same drop-down menu.

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Remember, if you turn on the public sharing link to your presentation and set it so that the public can edit it, then anyone with access to that link can change your presentation!

You can use both public and private sharing options for the same presentation — for instance, you could allow the public to view your presentation but let only specific people edit or comment on it.

Any presentation you’ve shared (or that others have shared with you) will have an icon of two silhouetted heads next to it in the presentation list on your Google Slides home page.

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You can also share a presentation from Google Drive, including from a Team Drive, without having to open it first in Google Slides. See “How to share a document for collaboration” (for sharing from My Drive) and “How to share documents in Team Drives” (for sharing from Team Drives) in our quick guide to using Google Drive for collaboration.

To collaborate on the presentation: The people you’ve shared a presentation with can view, comment on, or edit it (depending on the permissions you’ve granted them) at the same time as you, or at any time that’s convenient.

If you’ve given them edit permissions, they can directly edit the slides in the presentation. That’s fine for correcting factual errors or misspellings, but we’ve found that for making larger suggestions in Slides, adding comments works better. Collaborators can attach comments to a whole slide or a specific item in it, but their suggestions don’t interfere with the slide layout or formatting.

To add a comment to a presentation: Click on a slide thumbnail in the left pane or on the slide itself in the main viewing window, or select an image or text on the slide, and click the “Add comment” icon on the toolbar at the top of your presentation.

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A comment box opens to the right of the slide. It has your name across the top and an entry line where you can type in a brief comment about the selected item. When you’re done typing, click the Comment button.

 

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A note card appears to the right of any slide with a comment from you or a collaborator. Clicking this card expands it to reveal an entry line (“Reply…”) where you can add more comments to it. Any replies to a comment appear stacked below it.

 

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Clicking the Resolve button closes the card and removes it from the presentation.

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You can instantly see which slides have comments on them by looking in the preview pane on the left; any slide with a comment has an icon to its left indicating the number of comments.

To see a listing of all the comments in the presentation, including ones that have been marked resolved, click the “Open comment history” icon (it looks like a conversation bubble with text on it) toward the upper-right of the page. This listing helps you go through all the comments that have been added to the presentation without having to hunt for them. Clicking a comment in this listing jumps to the slide where the comment is located.

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You can reply to, or resolve, the comment from within the listing, but not directly on the slide unless you click the slide itself. Clicking the slide closes the comments listing pane and reveals any comment boxes that are set to the right of a slide.

For more details about collaborating on your presentation, including what it’s like to collaborate in real time, see “How to collaborate on a document” in our Google Drive guide.

Give a presentation

When it’s time to play your presentation, Google Sheets has two presenter modes: Present and Presenter view. Present mode essentially shows what your audience will see, while Presenter view mode has a few extras for your eyes only.

Present mode: To use this mode, click the Present button at the upper-right corner of the screen. Google Sheets will expand your screen to a full-screen view, showing the slide you’re currently on. If you want to start the slideshow from the beginning, instead of clicking the Present button itself, click the down arrow to its right and select “Present from beginning.”

When you move the cursor with your mouse or touchpad, a control bar appears over the lower-left of your presentation. If you want the slideshow to play automatically, click the play button on the control bar; clicking the same button again pauses playback. You can also use the bar to manually move  forward or back in the slides or jump directly to a specific slide in the sequence.

 

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The Pointer button on the control bar turns your mouse cursor into a laser pointer; click it again to toggle it off. If you’re using the Chrome browser, you’ll also see a Captions button that transcribes your words as you speak (English only) and shows them on-screen to your audience.

Clicking the Q&A or Notes button takes your presentation out of full-screen mode and opens a second “Presenter view” window. In other words, it takes you into Presenter view mode.

Presenter view mode: This is basically Present mode with an additional, separate window, where you can view your speaker notes for each slide and control the Google Slides’ Q&A function. The Presenter view window also lets you control playback and navigate through your slides. You can directly go into this mode from the main Slides interface by clicking the down arrow next to the Present button and selecting “Presenter view” from the drop-down menu.

 

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If you click the “Presenter view” option from the main screen or the Notes button on the control bar in Present mode, the Presenter view window displays the Speaker Notes tab on the right. If you click the Audience Tools tab in the Presenter view window or click the Q&A button from Present mode, you’ll see the Audience Tools tab, where you can use the Q&A function.

This tool helps you take questions from remote audience members as they watch your presentation. When you enable Q&A by clicking the “Start new” button, your audience sees a link toward the top of your presentation. An audience member can click that link in the web browser on their phone or computer and then type a question for you. In the Presenter view window, you can choose to show their question in the midst of the presentation for the audience to see as you answer it.

 

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Download and export a presentation

Your presentations will remain stored in Google Drive for as long as you want them to, but there are times when you’ll want to download them for use offline. When you download a presentation, you can choose to convert it to PowerPoint (.pptx) format or one of six other formats, including PDF.

On the top menu, select File > Download as and choose a file format. The presentation will be saved to your PC’s hard drive in that format.

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Of course, a big reason to download and save a file in PowerPoint format is to send it to colleagues who use PowerPoint instead of Slides. But if you’ve already been working on a document in .pptx format and don’t need to download it to your hard drive, you can simply select File > Email as attachment and send it directly to one or more colleagues.

Use the Google Slides mobile app

The Google Slides mobile app for Android and iOS (in iPhone and iPad versions) is handy for previewing your presentations, making quick edits to them or following up on your collaborators’ comments. Any changes you make to your presentation are automatically saved and will appear the next time you open it in the Google Slides web app.

With the exception of the Explore and Version history tools, the mobile app has many of the same features described in this guide. You can even share presentations and work on them with other people through the mobile app. (See “How to share from the Google Drive, Docs, Slides and Slides mobile apps” in our Google Drive guide.)

 

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A toolbar along the top lets you take actions such as playing your presentation as a slideshow, sharing it with others, and adding comments. A navigation bar along the bottom shows thumbnails of the slides in your presentation; tap a thumbnail to view the slide in the main window. Click the three-dot icon at the upper-right corner to access your presentation’s Q&A history, change its layout theme, or show speaker notes for it. Tapping an image or text on a slide brings up new top and bottom toolbars that let you adjust the appearance of the selected image or the formatting of the text.

Use keyboard shortcuts

Save time in Google Slides by using keyboard shortcuts for common tasks. Here’s a handful of the most useful shortcuts below. (Mac users, substitute the “Cmd” or ⌘ key for “Ctrl” And the “Option” key for “Alt” unless a separate Mac shortcut is noted.)

Handy Google Slides shortcuts

You can discover more shortcuts by selecting Help > Keyboard shortcuts from the top menu when you have a presentation open in Google Slides.

Credit: Howard Wen, Computerworld