Tips & Features to Enhance Your Google Slides Presentation
By: Curtis Stanier
Tags: Presentations, Communication, Product Management, Business, Startup

1 | Add Icons

Icons add a simple visual dimension to help convey meaning and understanding, and they leave an impression with your audience. They’re a subtle and underused detail.

Slides Carnival has a post that links to icons you can use in your presentation. There are a few different styles available. These icon sets are incredibly flexible — you can resize and recolour them using the tools available within Google Slides.

To resize, simply click and use the squares in the normal way. Some of them will scale automatically, others may need you to also change the line thickness.

To recolour, use the fill or line colour tool.

The icon sets linked above are free to use but require attribution. Make sure you credit the creators!

💡 Tip: Don’t mix different sets of icons. Find a set that matches your theme/style for a more consistent and professional feel.

SlideCarnival pulled together a number of Icon Sets to use. The example above is from the amazing FontAwesome team.

2 | Crop and Mask Images

The Crop and Mask tools in Google Slides offer a great way to tweak images quickly to fit the presentation better.

Crop allows you to change where the proportions of an image and hide anything outside of that space. For example, imagine you had a landscape image — crop allows you to make that square (or even portrait).

Mask applies a shape over the top of the image and hides the content of the image outside of that shape. In the example below, I add a circle mask to the image to soften the edge of the photo. Masks can be customised like any normal shape (e.g adjusting boarder radius or arrow points.)

As with any tools like this — use wisely. I find it’s beneficial to keep the shapes simple (circles, part/rounded rectangles) than to get too adventurous with the different options.

Masking a photo to soften the edges

To find the tools, select the image you want to edit. In the toolbar, around the middle, you’ll find the crop icon. The crop and mask buttons are almost in the same button in the toolbar. Crop is the main button and mask is in the dropdown immediately to the right.

After you’ve cropped or masked, if you want to reposition the image inside the cropping, simply double click. This lets you move the image while the crop and mask remain in place.

⚠️ Warning: Something I have discovered in the past, if I have an extremely large filesize image (e.g. 40Mb+) and I crop it, Google does some optimisation of the image in the background that reduces the quality. This primarily affects animated gifs but something to consider.

3 | Create Flat Illustrations with Shapes

It may not be as powerful as Sketch, but the number of shapes and formatting options allow you to be really creative. Attributes like the fill and border colours, border radius and shadows layered in the correct way create a world of options.

This is a screenshot form one of my Slide decks. The smartphone frame was made from the basic shapes available in Google Slides.

I most commonly use this to frame screenshots or mockups of apps so they look like they’re in a phone. It gives a feeling of refinement to your slidedeck.

The image to the left was built using the basic google shapes. The phone itself is a rounded rectangle with a transparent fill and a 12px boarder. The notch is a rounded rectangle overlapping the top with a lighter grey circle and rectangle over the top. The buttons on the left, again are rounded rectangles rotated and overlapping the first. Group them together and put your screenshot behind and you’re good to go.

⬇ Free Template: I made this template is available for free here. Simply make a copy of the file and and copy the shapes. Note, I recommend grouping them together first! (Select all the shapes, then click “Arrange” and “Group”)

While there are transparent images of phones you can use, I find this provides much for flexibility. Screenshots and mockups often come from a variety of devices sizes and you can accommodation simply by resizing the frame. No special design tools need! P.S. Bonus points for using and animated gif behind it! (See #6 in this list)

I’ve also used similar methods for website screenshots/mockups in browsers and even post-its for remote workshops!

4 | Copy Format

A slidedeck is not much different to any other digital Product. Content is always king — however, a visual consistency provides an overall more polished and pleasant experience.

Copy format is an excellent way build this consistency. It will copy all the set format of an element (essentially, all the things that appear in the toolbar and in the advanced formatting) such as fill, borders, fonts, shadows etc.

The Paint Format button appears on the left in the toolbar near the Undo, Redo and Print icons.

To paint the format, click the source item (the one you want to copy from). Then select the Paint Format button in the toolbar. It appears near the printer icon and is a paint roller. Click this and then click the item to paste the format to.

Paint Format is best used when you’ve already completed work but have subsequently changed the formatting.

💡 Tip: Quickly duplicate an element or group by holding [ALT] while clicking and dragging. It will make a duplicate under your cursor and release your click in the correct position.

5 | Replace Image (from URL/Upload)

This is great way to make changes to images without dealing with cropping and formatting from scratch — again, giving you consistency!

To do this, select the image you want to update and click “Replace image” in the tool bar (it will be near the centre.) This will give you a few options but I most commonly use “Upload” or “From URL.”

I use this primarily for creating team slides and updating screenshots and mockups.

In the example above, for a “team slide”, you can quick grab an image from Slack. Always ask permission before using someone’s images though! (Thanks to Nikki Anderson in this example)

6 | Creating Animated Images

This is something been using more often to better convey the experience or journey customers go through. It is always helpful to have the individual screens but playing them through really helps your audience visualise what you’re explaining.

There are two parts to creating animations in slidedecks:

Capture the Content Converting it Gif (fyi, I say gif not jif)

The main way I create the content is simply by using the screen recording function on my phone. For iOS, Apple outline the instructions here and the same functionality is available on Android. Once you’ve captured the recording, send the file to your computer.

There are some applications that will directly convert the video file to a gif format. However, I actually make a recording of the video using GIPHY Capture. This works for me because of the flexibility in setting loops, export settings and trimming the length of the video.

Making a recording with GIPHY Capture

Open the screen recording file in Quicktime. Open GIPHY Capture Resize the capture area (the area green) over the part of the video I want to record Start recording on GIPHY Capture Play the video in Quicktime (press the Spacebar to play) Stop the record in GIPHY Capture when I’m done. Trip the clip in GIPHY Capture. Export as Gif

💡 Tip: If the Gif file is more than 40Mb, I’d recommend exporting it again with a smaller pixel size. I avoid changing frame rate as most times I find it too jittery.

Now add you new Gif to your slidedeck and wow your audience! I also used the above method for creating the animations used in this article.

7 | Sharing Internally and making it comment-able

I mentioned at the start that one of the most powerful parts of Google’s Office Suite is the accessibility.

Unless there is a strong reason against it, I’d recommend making your deck Public inside the Organisation with Commenter rights. This information could potentially be valuable to anyone in the company and part of our role is to breakdown silos. However, even if you want to take a more cynical view on this you simply spend less time granting individual humans access which is not an effective use of your time nor the cost-of-delay associated with them waiting for you to share.

The Commenter rights is another manifestation of my Default-to-Open to encourage people to ask questions and challenge publicly to allow a broader debate something I’ve touched on before in my Product Manager Bottleneck Article).

When I build slidedecks, I build them with self-service in mind. This means, I assume the person reading it won’t be listening to me present it at the same time. Creating decks like this removes myself as a bottleneck in information distribution which is one of the biggest challenges faced by growing companies and it stifles how effective they can be.

You can change sharing settings by clicking the “Share” button in the top right of the screen. Inside share, there are two sections, “People & Groups” and “Get Links.” The second lets you set the link to be accessible to anyone in your organisation as a Viewer, Commentor or Editor.

It’s important to note this isn’t either / or. My usual approach is to give the organisation comment rights (under Get Link) and my immediate team edit rights (under People & Groups).