Google Slides is getting some new features that should help you work more efficiently and make it easier to customize your presentations.
For starters, Slides now plays nice with Google Keep, so you can easily drag-and-drop content from the note-taking app into your presentation. Another new feature lets you “link and sync slides from multiple presentations with one click” for hassle-free updates, G Suite Product Manager Zeina Oweis wrote in a Wednesday blog post.
Beyond that, you can now insert diagrams into your presentations; view all your slides at once in a Grid View, which should make reordering them a lot easier; and use add-ons to do more. These new features are rolling out to all customers globally on the Web today.
To try out the new Keep integration, go to Tools, select “Keep Notepad,” and you’ll see your Keep notes on the right side of the screen. From there, just select the notes from Keep you want to add and drag them into Slides. Slides will then automatically add a title and description for you.
Oweis said the folks at the state of Colorado’s IT Office have been using this new feature to keep track of and report population numbers at different agencies.
“Instead of digging through emails and Docs to track down figures, the team saves statistics to Keep and drags them into Slides to present,” Oweis wrote.
Meanwhile, the new linking feature should come in handy when you’re putting together several presentations and need to make sure the information in them is consistent. Instead of copying slides from one presentation to another, you can now just update the linked slides to match the source.
There’s also a new Skip slide feature, which will help you “tailor presentations to different audiences,” Oweis wrote. This will let you skip certain slides when you’re presenting from a phone or laptop, so you don’t have to delete them.
With the new add-ons, you can search for and add images from Adobe Stock, use the Shutterstock Editor to add and customize photos, and more – right inside Slides. To see what’s available, just tap “add-ons” in the Slides menu bar.
Finally, you can now use App Scripts to further customize your slides and automate workflows.
“Sales teams can use Apps Script to automatically pull in information from Sheets’ databases to create customized client pitch decks and templates,” Oweis wrote. “Marketing teams can host internal assets in a customized sidebar in Slides for easy access to logos and files they use most often.”