Google Slides Updates October 2018

Google Slides and G Suite respectively, in the same way as PowerPoint and Office 365, updates constantly. OK, not constantly but at least once per month. Starting with this article, we will keep you up to date on what’s new in Google’s presentation software and how you, as a presenter, can take advantage of it.

The place where Google Slides shines and continues to shine is collaboration. However, with their newest update, they introduced quite a lot of other interesting new features and integrations that we find extremely interesting. Let’s start here:

If you are familiar with Keep (an app that you can use both on Android, iOS, as a web app and Chrome Extension) and you use it as your personal organizer, we have good news for you! Google introduced an integration between Keep and Google Slides, which allows you to transfer your important ideas/notes directly into your slides. You can do that easily with a simple drag and drop.

What’s more, your Notes in Keep have Titles and Description so if you are building a blank slide and your Title and additional text boxes are still empty, when you drag your note from Keep it will put the respective information to the proper text boxes.

We can all agree that sometimes we need to copy and use some slides into other documents – let’s say in Google Docs. However, that slideshow keeps changing and it would be great if we can somehow make the document to change accordingly. Well, now you can do that with the Linked Slides feature. Just copy then paste your slide to a document but when pasting, tell Google you want to have Link to the slide. This way, Google will keep updating the document every single time when the Slide is also updated.

Wait, there’s more:

Diagrams – Now you have the option to insert Diagrams directly into your presentations, which could be a great way to display quite a lot of data in an easy way.

Grid view – You always wanted to view all your slides at once? Well, now you can with the new Grid view. It provides you with a chance to see your slides as thumbnails, which will help you easily rearrange them and see your story from above.

Skip Slide – Do you want to show a presentation to different audiences but always have to delete certain slides? Worry no more! With this new functionality of Google Slides, you can now just skip the desired slides and keep them for later without deleting them. Yes, this is the Hide Slide feature in PowerPoint.

And for a finale – it is now possible for you to extend your Google Slides with Add-ons! Some of the most interesting ones:

Adobe Stock add-on – find your desired images from Adobe Stock directly in Slides. With it, you can search, preview and even purchase images without the need to leave Google Slides. Another cool feature in the add-on is its ability to execute Visual Searches, helping you find more relevant photos than the text search.

Shutterstock editor – similar to Adobe Stock add-on, you can choose from the vast range of stock photos in Shutterstock and event customize them within Google Slides (Add filters, text, logos and many other)

If you are not a fan of these two ad-ones you can also check the other five new integrations for Slides – Pear Deck, Unsplash, Lucidchart, Balsamiq and Noun Project.

And of course, there are add-ons not only for images but also for things like Easy Accents which allows you to add symbols specific to a language.

These updates you should already be seeing in Google Slides, so go test them out for yourself. And if you don’t feel like doing it, we are always here to help you build and deliver effective presentations. Just let us know.